Digested week: I feel like a million dollars on my child’s prescription flu medicine

‘It turns some children cuckoo, so keep an eye on her.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Monday

With the news full of alarm about this winter’s “tripledemic” – rising case numbers of RSV, flu and Covid, particularly among children – when my child’s fever hits 103F late on Monday, I do something I hate: drag her around the corner to urgent care, the 24-hour drop-in clinic where for $150 you can be seen immediately by a doctor who’s never seen you before and will never see you again. It’s the fast food of healthcare, right down to the décor – which consists, unnervingly, of wall-to-wall framed photos of TV doctors, as if the place is cosplaying medical help and the clinicians have all been booked from central casting.