Veteran dealmaker Jonathan Boyers has spoken out about his battle with COVID-19.

The 53-year-old is a partner and head of corporate finance in the UK at KPMG and became ill a week before Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a nationwide lockdown on March 23.

Here he shares his experiences:

“It’s difficult to say exactly when it started but I remember going to watch the Stereophonics at the Manchester Arena on March 13 and feeling completely fine.

A couple of days after that I started to suffer from headaches but the over-riding feeling was aching bones. It felt like a bad case of the flu.

Soon after that I lost my sense of smell which is a key indicator of COVID-19. At about the same time I found that someone I’d come into contact with the week before had been diagnosed with coronavirus so I feared the worst and realised there was a very good chance I had it too.

By that stage I was following the advice and self-isolating. With flu you normally feel better after a week but I struggled to shake it off.

I was working remotely and having a lot of Teams meetings but after about a week I couldn’t smell or taste anything.

I had a dry cough for a couple of weeks. I have to admit that I started to worry after a while. You Google COVID-19 and expect to get better in a week to 10 days but when you don’t it’s unnerving.

When I still felt bad after 10 or 11 days I took myself off to bed for a couple of days and just slept. At that point I was thinking about seeking medical help but I didn’t want to add to the workload of the NHS.

After that I started to feel a bit better but it was a slow process. It took a while for my cough to clear up and my sense of smell and taste to return.

All in all it probably took me about a month after the first symptoms to feel completely better. With hindsight I should have shown it more respect at the start. I carried on working from home for the first week when I should have rested.

At some point I plan to take an antibody test to 100 per cent confirm that I had coronavirus before recovering but I certainly had all the symptoms.

My advice to anyone else who feels that they have COVID-19 is to rest up and listen to their body at the start rather than carrying on as normal.”

Award-winning Jonathan Boyers has been a corporate finance adviser for nearly 30 years and has been involved in some of the North West’s biggest deals.