
Ask HN: How did you catch Covid-19? - blackpanda
Anyone here caught COVID-19 while taking all advised precautions?<p>Just trying to measure how precautious we have to be exactly? Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?
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darrelld
Two people in my office were out sick. One came to sit at my desk to help me
out with a DB query after she was done with sick leave.

I got sick a few days later.

Went to the doctor who said they couldn't give COVID-19 tests since they
didn't have it, but she gave me a regular flu test.

Results came back and I was flagged as positive for Coronavirus, but it came
with a note from my doctor saying there was no way to confirm that it was
COVID-19. I assume it was given symptoms and timing.

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Foober223
I don't think any official statistics exist. And any stats could even be
misleading. People who take precautions very seriously (ie nurses) may
actually have higher rates of infection. The average Joe Blow who never wears
a mask or washes hands may end up with a lower % chance of infection. Because
those nurses are working in hospitals, surrounded by super spreaders shedding
virus all day long.

Covid-19 has proven similar to the common cold in transmission. The common
cold is itself a corona virus so it makes sense.

Basically you are going to be exposed to Covid-19 at some point in your life.
It's guaranteed. It's here to stay with the human race, just like the common
cold corona's.

But there is value in delaying your exposure, even if you have little personal
risk. Delaying your own infection also delays the infection of others (more
vulnerable than you). They may be holding out for a vaccine. It avoids
overloading a hospital. It gives the medical community more time to develop
best practices and apply them to more people. If everyone gets covid-19 on day
1 then no one gets to benefit from the hard won knowledge paid for in death
and damaged lung tissue.

Viruses tend to become less deadly as they mutate. Delaying your infection has
value, even if it's inevitable.

~~~
Foober223
To the question in the title. I don't know how I caught it. Before the lock
down I was touching doors used by thousands of people daily. Touching gas
pumps, etc. I have a habit of touching my face.

Luckily I had a mild reaction, but I still feel a slight tickle/burning in the
lungs 2 months into it.

~~~
dmurthy
What were your symptoms like? I’ve read only that mild is not exactly mild by
flu standards yet I know another friend who had it but was having a bad throat
ache for 3 days and fever. Took her 10 days to recover.

~~~
Foober223
Have/had a mild Bronchitis-like feeling in my lungs. But have/had no
difficulty breathing despite that. No shortness of breath. The feeling
sometimes goes away, but them later resurfaces.

To the best of my knowledge I have not lost lung capacity. I can mow the lawn
(.3 acre) with a push mower in 1 go without stopping in hot weather.

Had a mild headache and mild sore throat at the height of it. Body was mildly
achy in the evening near/at bed time. Occasional cough near the tail end of
the recovery. For me this was not a cough heavy sickness.

No medication used. Lifted weights throughout the entire process. Symptoms
were very mild but lasted forever.

Overall my personal symptoms were mild enough that I was not suffering. This
is not to downplay. Other people have strange effects, such as "covid toes"
where the flesh in their toes die. Or their immune system reacts causing
inflammation in the lungs with serious damage to tissue. One bad thing about
new viruses is a strong immune system can sometimes bite you. It was a big
issue in the 1918 flu that was most deadly to people in their 20's. Elderly
were relatively untouched by the 1918. Luckily Covid-19 has not proven to be
particularly dangerous to young people so far. But it is causing bad immune
responses in some young people, even if not at a large scale like the 1918
virus.

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tmaly
I am not sure if I had it, but I had a back sickness back in December. My son
caught something that they said tested positive for RSV. I caught something
but got over it.

One of the guys on my team got Covid. The girl sitting in next cube also got
it. He said it was like a pretty bad flu, but they both recovered.

My neighbor had it, but he was in Westchester county NY running his cleaning
business. He thought it was just stress from all the work. He went to a local
urgent care down the road and that is how he found out he has the anti-bodies.

My other neighbor's grandmother had it, she was 85. They gave her the
experimental plasma as she did not look like she was going to make it. She
recovered thankfully.

So far I only know of one person that passed away from it. A good friend had a
mentor who was 63. He was over in London and was forced into a NHS hospital.
He passed away from the Covid.

On the note of being cautious, I still would like a formal study done on
surface transmission. There has been some much misinformation on this. There
was a study cycling on the news months back. CDC did an update to their site
recently and all the news sites reported the study was flawed. On May 22, CDC
updated website to provide clarification which essentially said they don't
know about surface transmission risks.

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alexyz12
I am shocked that I don't know anyone who has it. I am fascinated by this
question though. I would have figured 4 months ago that everyone I know would
have gotten it by now.

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Darmody
I think we all got it at home. We didn't knew it was COVID so we probably
spread it around. This happened in late February when no measures were taken
yet.

Several weeks later we were told that person A who went to Milan was in the
hospital in a very delicate condition. I want to point out that he is
overweight. That person passed the virus to Person B who passed it to Person C
who lives with me.

We all got sick. From almost no symptoms to mild symptoms.

I personally felt like crap for two or three days. I felt tired, I had my eyes
burning like if I had a fever (I don't know if I had fever or not, I don't
usually check unless I'm really hot) and I also had a cough for a few days.

We're curious to see if we have antibodies which would be pretty nice.

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beckler
Pretty sure we caught it at the end of February just before things starting
getting serious in the US. We had gone to an indoor water park for the
weekend, and roughly two weeks later we were all sick with flu-like symptoms,
but we all took a flu test and they all came back negative.

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therockspush
Guessing most people on here talking about maybe getting it in February are
from the Bay Area.

February was the last time I got sick, covid-like symptoms, and going back
through my slack out-of-office channel a lot of people at my office did too.

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countername
I didn't catch covid-19, or maybe I had it at February when I got a little bit
sick. Who knows. In my family or social field nobody got it too, or just
didn't know it.

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kleer001
> how precautious we have to be exactly?

Nobody knows precisely. It's a brand new pathogen. Research is still being
done.

> Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?

What's your comfortable level of risk? How wide is your sense of self? Does it
include your neighbors? passers by? their neighbors and their grandparents?

------
whb07
Sub 40 yo are at higher risk of death from other things even if you catch this
virus. Eat right and exercise seems to be the best defense even if you acquire
it as the largest risk factor besides being old is obesity.

~~~
DanBC
> the largest risk factor besides being old is obesity.

Obesity increases risk of covid-19 (and many other diseases). It's not the
largest (other than age) risk factor.

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1)

> In summary after full adjustment, death from COVID-19 was strongly
> associated with: being male (hazard ratio 1.99, 95%CI 1.88-2.10); older age
> and deprivation (both with a strong gradient); uncontrolled diabetes (HR
> 2.36 95% CI 2.18-2.56); severe asthma (HR 1.25 CI 1.08-1.44); and various
> other prior medical conditions. Compared to people with ethnicity recorded
> as white, black people were at higher risk of death, with only partial
> attenuation in hazard ratios from the fully adjusted model (age-sex adjusted
> HR 2.17 95% CI 1.84-2.57; fully adjusted HR 1.71 95% CI 1.44-2.02); with
> similar findings for Asian people (age-sex adjusted HR 1.95 95% CI
> 1.73-2.18; fully adjusted HR 1.62 95% CI 1.43-1.82).

> Conclusions

> We have quantified a range of clinical risk factors for death from COVID-19,
> some of which were not previously well characterised, in the largest cohort
> study conducted by any country to date. People from Asian and black groups
> are at markedly increased risk of in-hospital death from COVID-19, and
> contrary to some prior speculation this is only partially attributable to
> pre-existing clinical risk factors or deprivation; further research into the
> drivers of this association is therefore urgently required. Deprivation is
> also a major risk factor with, again, little of the excess risk explained by
> co-morbidity or other risk factors. The findings for clinical risk factors
> are concordant with policies in the UK for protecting those at highest risk.
> Our OpenSAFELY platform is rapidly adding further NHS patients' records; we
> will update and extend these results regularly. Keywords COVID-19, risk
> factors, ethnicity, deprivation, death, informatics.

