Covid-22 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780648589570)

Caesar Seetham, former financial consultant and erstwhile poet, is reported by his mercurial wife Sybil for breaching home quarantine, as a new, mutated strain of coronavirus sweeps the world. To her chagrin, she finds herself confined with him in the close quarters of The Sceptred Crown - a third rate corona hotel. While chaos reigns in the outside world, strange new symptoms emerge. Those infected with COVID-22 show few symptoms at first, except a tendency to gibber and babble in a kind of deranged and semi-poetic aphasia, before rapidly succumbing to silence, coma, haemorrhage and death.

While Caesar records his impressions of a world gone mad, Dr Mowbray, in charge at the Sceptred Crown, learns that a unique antibody in Caesar's blood could prevent the progress of the disease, leaving the infected, like Caesar, although trapped in a state of poetic aphasia, at least not declining into coma and death. For the process to succeed, Caesar must not only calmly and willingly give up his blood, but he must submit to having every drop drained, also giving up his life - the only way Mowbray will be able to extract enough antibodies to create a viable serum.

While Caesar considers what his life is worth, Sybil is struck by even more disturbing symptoms, and if he can't even save the woman he loves, why the hell should he bother saving the world?