The context about the anger and powerlessness.. I haven't heard too many people mention that.
I got the bug in March and my GP (who is amazing) told me to talk to the health department and the health department told me to talk to my GP or go to the ER. I was in the middle of moving out of my house when it hit. My girlfriend was gone (she had just taken an internship) and I was alone. I was furious about my lack of options and just the bullshit from everyone being overloaded, the stress of work (I work from home) and still wanting to pack boxes to finish my move. The last 4 days of fever were the worst. I remember my last night of fever acutely. Sitting alone in my bed with a throat that felt like a sun bleached mummy of a garden hose full of glitter, hallucinating, and stupefied (the coronavirus brain fog is one of the most interesting symptoms IMO). I sent my doctor's office a message on the medical portal and said "Fuck you and fuck the fucking health department, if I die alone today I want you to know you might have been able to help." My fever broke a few hours later and I was largely functional by the next day.
I've seen my doc since, we are fine and haven't talked about my message. I'm dealing with inflammation that looks like pericarditis by a lot of blood markers but is almost invisible to anything else that would confirm it. I had a heart attack a month ago. I'm 37 and relatively fit for a console jockey. That feeling of powerlessness and isolation. The worry of giving it to anyone else even if I did ask for help... On top of that the disbelief that I was going through it and the still persistent disbelief that I get from other people if I do talk about it. I won't forget it any time soon. Especially because ever since it feels like I've got a dinner plate glued inside my chest that no one can find.
Wear a mask. We are in this for a long haul. Well, I might not be.
The psychological aspect of this reminded me of when my depression hit and I responded so differently emotionally to everything and felt like (and was) a completely different person. Habits and rituals that used to be nothing pleasure for my past self, things that I did to reward yourself for a good job done were painful and tedious to my present self.
The depression was one thing, but suddenly being a different person when you thought you knew yourself, and wondering if you should learn to live as this new, damaged person with its different emotional attitudes to everything (that I didn't trust were sustainable) or act like your old self working toward your old self's goals trusting in the wisdom of the person you once were---that was a different dilemma I didn't know I had to make, that nobody understood.
Wow a heart attack at 37?! How did the coronavirus contribute to it? Never heard a link between the two. Glad you are stable now, any idea how the heck you got it? I'm beyond paranoid of contracting it...
We are just starting to learn about the long term effects. They are myriad and present for even people who had mild to no symptoms. Joint pain, cognitive issues, stroke, and cardiac arrest are shockingly common. Plenty of articles have popped up here on HN about it. No one knows anything except that it’s hard to tell who will have problems or why.
I have a pretty good guess as to how I got it, but nothing conclusive. It’s everywhere and has been since the beginning of the year.
For context, Plaschke is the senior sports writer for the Los Angeles Times. I have been reading his columns (mainly Dodgers coverage) off and on for at least 20 years. So my subjective experience was that this definitely felt like someone I “knew” as opposed to a random journalist. Also this is the only time I recall him writing about a topic other than sports
This part hit me especially hard as it describes one of my fears:
“I wore a mask everywhere. I followed all the rules, but a couple of weeks ago I didn’t follow my instincts. I briefly let my guard down. The coronavirus came out swinging.”
It's interesting to know if people who really are careful and follow the handwashing/mask/distancing rules get sick. It seems like they're much, much less likely to.
I don't think it's nearly that easy. I find myself constantly struggling with the balance between proper precaution and not completely shutting down my life.
Do I invite friends for a nice socially distanced lunch in the park? Maybe or do that quick trip to Home Depot to get supplies for my projects at home. That feels easy to justify, one quick trip and these projects could keep me busy for weeks. But is it easy to justify because I WANT to do it, or because it's actually a good idea. It's always easy to rationalize something you want, and often hard to know your doing it.
Sure, my trip to Home Depot is probably fine. I'm probably healthy, and wouldn't pick up anything on the outing, but on the other hand it's optional, and what if I picked up Covid on my last trip to the grocery store, and wind up passing it on to some 70 year old who HAS to go to Home Depot because their toilet broke.
It's a hard line to know what is the proper amount of caution. At least for me. Very much unlike walking out a space station airlock, where the proper precaution is very clear.
I believe he may feel it was this slip up, but I highly doubt it. Look at The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden or Norway where practically nobody is using masks. If masks made that much of a difference, we would surely be able to tell.
> Look at The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden or Norway where practically nobody is using masks.
I'm not sure you have a good grasp on what you're talking about. Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe,and the absolute worse in nordic countries.
The strategy followed by the Netherlands is to quarantine everyone who does a covid19 test, and get anyone feeling any symptoms to get immediately tested.
More importantly, the strategy followed in the countries you've mentioned was to intentionally let the disease spread in a way that didn't overwhelmed health services. While the rest of Europe is intentionally trying to completely contain the disease, the strategy followed by Sweden consists of letting it spread freely as long as they can claim their health services aren't overtaxed.
In my opinion that approach is idiotic because currently the best thing health services can do to a critical covid19 case is linger around while watching the patient die, thus what's the point of bothering about if a health service has enough beds to fill?
As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case. Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March. Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good. As was the original story from experts.
> Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good
One could argue that, but one would look like a moron without any proof, and with a lot of evidence showing the exact opposite.
Given the huge amount of evidence of transmission by cough droplets and the lack of evidence of even a single transmission out of millions by touching masks/surfaces, keeping droplets out of your mouth and nose is the only thing that helps and it definitely does more good than harm.
If the person wearing the mask is not using it properly then that's not good for them. The wearer is still protecting other people from contracting the virus, if they (maybe not knowingly) have it.
> As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case.
You're free to cherry-pick whatever data fits your prejudice if that makes you feel better.
However, I hope you understand that garbage in means garbage out, and if you feel desperate enough to grab onto garbage to try to rationalize your prejudice then you should seriously rethink what you're doing, because thinking ain't it.
> Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March.
I'm curious to see where you came up with that nonsense.
If you take a step back into reality and look at the facts, you'd eventually find out how Spain and Italy reigned in their daily death rates from 1k to single digits by enacting public health policies that included a mix of quarantines and mandatory masks.
"Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe, and the absolute worse in nordic countries."
That is an incredibly misleading way of saying "Sweden is far better than Belgium, the UK and Spain in terms of death rate per 100k, and significantly better than Italy":
In fact, Sweden is ~mid pack for first-world countries. You really have to cherry pick the data to make it look bad. Yes, Finland is doing relatively well, but it is also beat out by world-renowned public health stalwarts like Afghanistan and Sudan, so...perhaps other factors are at play.
I don't get this obsession with comparing Sweden, a remote, sparsely-populated country, to more dense, well-connected, large population centers. If you really want to compare Sweden, please restrict your comparisons to its closely similar, equally remote and sparsely populated neighbors, namely, Norway and Finland. The 10X difference between them will be immediately obvious.
Finland and Norway have half the population of Sweden.
Sweden has about the same population as Belgium, Portugal and Greece...or Georgia (and Ohio, and Michigan, and...) in the US, none of which are places that people are shy about extrapolating from, when it suits their narrative.
You may not like the conclusions that can be drawn from Sweden, but you can't dismiss it based on population. Try again.
That’s an aggressive put-down for someone who is not omniscient himself...
Doctors do a lot for a critical Covid patients! “Proning”, anticoagulants, anti inflammatories, anti virals (E.g. remdesivir), CPAP, and, yeah, if all else fails, ventilation.
Masks are more effective at protecting other people from your germs, not the other way around. You are at risk if you hang around people who aren’t wearing masks and you put people around you at risk by not wearing.
I can't imagine what thought process leads from an unsubstantiated claim that practically nobody uses masks in some countries to an assertion that they must not make any difference.
First: USE YOUR MASK. Don't argue about this shit. Researchers will do their job and will TELL YOU if it makes sense or not when the data is out.
Its absolutly a no brainer and no issue at all to wear a mask. Its a no brainer on an discussion base as well.
And don't bring Sweden in here. They are quite informed and took a lot of precaution and still have bad numbers but nonethless there is probably 10x or 100x less Karens in Sweden then in USA.
Reading this brought back memories. I caught it back in March here in WA state. I’m not sure when I got it. But I’m pretty sure it was the week before the lockdown (March 23rd). I was already self-isolating, but I just got careless one day. I went grocery shopping, wore a mask, brought my groceries home, put them away, and then ate something and scratched my nose. It was right then that I realized I hadn’t washed my hands after I got home and put away the groceries. About 3 or 4 days later, it kicked in.
My doctor was basically the same as the one in the article - couldn’t do anything for me. Kept telling me my case is considered minor because I can still breath and my temperature wasn’t spiking. I never hallucinated though. Feel like I missed out on that :)
My fever hit 103 and stayed there for over a week. A couple of days it hit 104. I told myself if it went higher I’d figure out how to get to the hospital. Luckily it didn’t go up. I was able to just stay home.
The chills were terrible. I was so cold and shivering so much that I couldn’t sleep. Eventually exhaustion caught up with me and I just passed out. I have no idea how I kept my dog fed and a minimum of accidents in the house. I really don’t remember anything from those 2 weeks. It’s just a haze.
But the one thing I do remember is the cough. I’ve had the flu, bronchitis, walking pneumonia, and even real, ICU pneumonia (to be fair over 2 decades ago so I don’t recall how bad it was), and the COVID cough was so much worse. I would curl up in the fetal position because I had coughed so much that I couldn’t straighten up. I walked hunched over because my abs hurt so bad. There were several times I’d start crying because I felt a coughing fit about to start. I don’t know if cough medicine helped at all, but I was drinking it every time I was lucid enough to remember to. I ran out one day and started panicking. I got really lucky and found a couple of bottles at a local Bartells. But I couldn’t go get it. I have great neighbors though. And one of them went and picked it up for me. They put themselves at risk to help me. They dropped it off at the end of my driveway and didn’t come within 40 feet of my front door. I waited till they were back in the house before I went and picked it up.
So yeah. It’s a “fever and a cough”. I really hope that none of you ever have to experience that “fever and a cough”
Edit: Some bio facts about me. I was 43 when I caught it. At the time I was training with power lifting, CrossFit, and a lot of rucking. If I really pushed myself, I could hit a 7 minute mile (not competitively fast, but fast for me). I would call myself healthy at the time I contracted it. No underlying health conditions (beyond bad eyesight and partial deafness).
Now? Yeah. I could hit a 7 minute. But it would hurt. I don’t recover as fast as I did pre-COVID after doing conditioning work.
I got it end of March, and I didn’t start training again until end of May I believe? Strength came back relatively quickly. I was back to my normal training weights in about a month. Conditioning is taking a lot longer. In June, a brisk walk would have me gasping. I started slow jogging in July. I started picking up the pace in August. I’m still gasping but not as much. And my resting heart rate isn’t back to where it was. I’m at 56bpm right now. Pre-COVID I was 47bpm.
Long term? I have no idea. Looks like right now my lung capacity was affected. Given my gains in the past 2 months, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll get back to where I was.
Have you gotten tested for any possible heart damage? There are some reports of athletes being benched because of a heart condition caused by COVID that can cause sudden death during exercise.
This isn't something that's likely to ever be verified conclusively, but we do have evidence that COVID-19 is associated with myocardial injury and myocarditis. Sure, it's not impossible a young, fit and healthy professional athlete was suffering from undiagnosed heart inflammation prior to contracting a novel virus. It's very unlikely to be the case when a bunch of healthy young people are suddenly diagnosed with the condition concurrent to testing positive for COVID-19, though.
I’ve had some bad flus the last couple of years where the coughing has gotten much worse, that part could be age related (I’m 45). This December could have been COVID of course, but I don’t remember it being worse than last year.
I'm pretty sure I caught it 2 weeks before Christmas 2019. I don't get sick often, I'm healthy with no underlying conditions, and when I've caught the flu in the past I've always bounced back fast.
Not this time. In addition to the other awful symptoms you mention, I agree that the worst thing is the cough. It would seemingly just not go away. Painful, congestive coughing fits for 2 weeks. I basically couldn't do anything during that time except stay in bed and tough it out. Fortunately, I'd already been WFH for a few years and didn't feel well enough to leave the house during that time, so I was self-isolating without realising what was going on.
Where do you live, and have you had an antibody test? I've heard so many people who've said they had it back in December, but I'm really doubtful. All the ones I've known who've had an antibody test have come back negative.
I had a flu back in October that matched the COVID symptoms almost exactly, but obviously wasn't it. It was still probably the most sick I've ever been, though.
I think there's going to be very few people in most countries who actually had it pre February / March.
I feel like half of the west coast caught something like that in December.
I had visited some Chinese friends in San Francisco for thanksgiving and came back early December and ended up knocked flat for the month of December with a cough / fever / shortness of breath deal. After I recovered, a person I see in the elevator said he got this really bad sickness after visiting people in San Francisco that was the same as mine and I was like me too!
Guesstimating the infection cause to a maskless moment ("Nobody is required to wear masks at the tables, so I removed my mask when I sat") sounds iffy, the protection afforded by masks is very light? (Unless he was always using N95 masks)
Although there is a body of evidence building that you are more likely to have a milder case if catching it wearing a mask (due to a slightly lower initial viral load).
Even self-made cloth mask show an effect on reducing spread. More and more studies show this now - and you can try for yourself. Put flour in front of you in cough into it, once with a self made mask and once without. The spread will be much less. Surgical and N95 masks are better to protect yourself (and others) though. Still, even a small reduction in spread can have a huge effect on the pandemic if everyone adopts it.
But someone who regularly wears an N95 mask with a valve might be less likely to contract the virus (because N95), so discouraging use of N95 masks with valves could make the situation worse.
N95s are good for protecting the wearer, not so good for protecting others from the wearer. In areas with high infection rates (a lot of the US), the likelihood that someone wearing a mask is infected goes up, thereby making N95s more problematic. Many stores around where I live are requiring N95 wearers to cover up the valves while inside. N95s are better than no mask at all of course, but that's a low bar for comparison.
How can this still be a topic that's debated today? It's August now. We've known it for about half a year now, and with "it" I mean "surgical types of masks protect others, N95 type masks protect yourself." That's it. There is varying degrees of protection depending on exact circuumstances, and it's all a game of probabilities, meaning it reduces risk, so is mostly meaningful on the population level, and less on the individual level.
But come on, how can this still be a discussion? Even people in remote Peruvian or Himalayan villages know it by now, the HN crowd definitely does. There are more memes about it out there than contributions to this thread.
Presumably only part of the issue was that he wasn't wearing a mask, while the bigger factor was that he was in an environment with lots of non-mask-wearing people in relatively close proximity.
I am not a person who underestimates Covid-19 and take all the precautions that are required.
But to be honest, I had a flu with similar symptoms 2 years ago and I pretty much thought I was dying. I am generally healthy, in my early 30s. Terrible, terrible muscle pain, fever, cough, general nausea all the time. I basically could not operate normally for 2 weeks, after those 2 weeks I was maybe functioning at 50% of my normal energy. Actually, many of my co-workers would get that flu too and my boss, a real workaholic that would work no matter what, even he had to take few days off because he couldn't even think straight.
So yes, Covid-19 sounds kind of like that bad flu. It is bad, but 2 years ago we would just call it "a bad flu". So I wonder if a lot of the fear of Covid is based more on propaganda and social panic than on actual health risks. The only explanation I see why politicians are so eager to overreact is because most of them are of certain age and belong to the high risk group.
Edit: I understand that most of the concerns about the virus might come from the fast spread and impact on hospitals. Thanks for the comments who clarified this.
The reasoned panic over Covid-19 was never really about the individual severity of the disease or even the number of people it would kill.
It's about the rapid spike in deaths and hospitalizations happening all at the same time because of how extremely fast it spreads.
The flu spreads slow enough that our medical infrastructure can usually handle the seasonal surge of cases. Too many cases all at once overwhelms the system, leads to more deaths than necessary, and potentially has even more catastrophic effects on our economy and supply chains than we've had if too many people call in sick at the same time.
To put it physics terms, the scary thing about Covid-19 is the impact, not the absolute force. A million people dying isn't too concerning compared to other causes of death. But if they all die in a single month, that's a huge systemic problem.
I don't think it's reasonable on an individual level to panic about catching Covid-19 compared to other health risks. It's akin to thinking death by terrorism is something to be more concerned about than dying in a car crash.
Two weeks is tolerable. And probably we got acquainted with it. Even in the worst of cases for the influenza virus. We know what it does, we know how to cure it...
Now compare that to almost 5 weeks of that (at least from personal experience) and no clue if it could get even worse. Are you actually in a risk group without knowing? Are you currently having vitamin deficiency or immunocompromised, maybe fighting another virus? Good luck with that. Not even talking about long term damage to your neural system. Fuck that.
Without better and deeper research on it I'll try to do my best to contain the situation as much as possible. Thinking otherwise means jeopardising friends and family health.
We should also consider that various people are affected in different ways. Some die, some recover but will have damaged organs for the rest of their lives, some recover being weak for sometime, some may recover fully with no long term side effects ( that we may know of right now?).
We need to stop thinking of death as the only statistic.
Edit:
Statistics are for policies. Our individual lives and the lives of those around us are our responsibility (e.g. don't impact others' lives due to our own recklessness and unwillingness to listen to reason).
Further, this repeated refusal of Americans of not listening to lessons learned from around the world (e.g. from those of us in South East Asia) will only count against American in the longer term.
I am not fully sure what this comment is intended to mean, but if it intends to imply that covid-19 is ‘just as bad as’ a bad flu, the excess death statistics in virtually every country of the world pretty categorically show that to be untrue.
Why do people feel the need to constantly refute this or bring this argument to the table?
I think you should flip it around and realize that the flu, is actually dangerous too, it's just we're way more conditioned to accept it as part of nature and part of every day life. We don't perceive a flu to be very dangerous although statistically, it's still seems risky for certain people in the same way Covid-19 is.
One could say that if you've survived a bad case of Influenza, well you also lived through a potentially fatal health event with potentially negative long term consequences from the inflammation your body went through to overcome it.
it's not just familiarity, it's also privilege and inequality.
the better-off, some of whom control the media, feel no threat from the flu because they all have lots of psychological and social safety and good health insurance, and so we have cursory coverage of the flu, mainly to remind us to get a flu shot (and then push it out of our brains again). none of those folks are ravaged by the flu, so no panic, or coverage of heartbreaking, anecdotal cases.
but covid is different in that the better-off don't already have an easy defense. so they're spreading their fear around disproportionately, so others can act on their behalf and for their safety. if it didn't affect the better-off, we'd have none of this attention and panic (and endless fretting over masks as the de facto sign of subservience).
I'm in a country with a large population who cannot afford not stop work as there is no welfare for them.
I often watch those people need to go about their daily lives regardless of the Corona virus situation. Regardless of their age.
For them, getting on with it is the only option and so it does make me ask questions about the motivations behind the coverage it receives as opposed to other ongoing existential issues which have been largely put on the back burner, although they really can't afford to be.
I remember right before this kicked off, climate change truly took the center after the Australian bush fires was absolutely front and center.
Poverty dengue fever and malaria will have killed a huge amount of people this year and are hardly discussed.
Edit: I should add that it's interesting to see the difference in behavior between those from a privileged country against those who aren't in that situation. The people with money act as if this is the plague, the people without it, well they just take precautions and do their best.
right, covid is the only danger as far as the better-off are concerned, and they have the influence to dictate the response. everything else can be conveniently ignored, and they have the influence to dictate that ignorance as well. it's been like that my whole life from faux-concern for africa to 9/11 to the near and dear banks of the financial crisis.
edit: i should add that this is not an argument against taking precautions, particularly distancing, but a callout of the hypocrisy underlying this kind of asymmetric mobilization and resource allocation, which exacerbates inequality.
The parent comment should remind us that regular flu is already pretty bad in its symptoms and in the number who die from it each year. A “bad flu” can be very bad indeed: e.g., 1968, 1957, 1918. [1] Moreover, using excess deaths to quantify COVID-19 vs. regular flu, the numbers are concerning even with all our efforts to contain this coronavirus and avoid overwhelming hospitals. [2]
Perhaps the symptoms overlap, and many Covid patients certainly seem to have no symptoms at all. But Covid can and does make health care systems collapse, makes doctors have to pick which patient dies and which one gets the only ventilator available etc.
It's also not a flue in the sense that there are rare but serious long term effects that we haven't fully grasped yet. A small percentage of children get Kawasaki disease (or something like it).
Using the word "propaganda" implies political involvement which seems out of place.
> The only explanation I see why politicians are so eager to overreact is because most of them are of certain age and because of that belong to the risk group.
I also think shutting everything down is a politically safer move than not doing so and having to face headlines about X number of deaths in their district/town due to [politician], even if most or nearly all of these deaths are very old people who may have died from the flu this year or next year anyways.
A relatively high percentage of people getting it require hospitalisation.
It's not the bubonic plague, but unchecked, it will overwhelm any medical system and the death toll will be much higher (it's already at least an order of magnitude more deadly than the flu).
It's not just about one person's flu-like symptoms, which may make them one of the "lucky" one who can stay home and don't require more care (although read other testimonies in this thread because some experienced way worse than your bout of flu).
It's also about people with other medical needs not being taken care of because of an overwhelmed system.
There are only so many available beds, respirators and medical staff.
There have been plenty of examples of that in the past months, in Europe, in South America, in NYC, in Wuhan even, where people are left to die at home or in hallways because there are not enough resources to care for them.
They don't just die of COVID, they die of cancer, they die of heart attacks and accidents that would otherwise be non-fatal when cared for in time.
We're getting better prepared, but not everywhere. Under-estimation is the danger here. Saying it's no worse than flu is not true. It is a lot more dangerous and insidious. It kills more and, left unchecked, will stress any local medical system to the point that even more will die. Many of those who get it will also end up with years of health issues.
You may easily survive getting it, maybe even without symptoms, but are you OK with spreading it to your family, your neighbors, your colleagues, and their families?
It may also affects older people but the original SARS virus -a cousin- affected mostly young healthy adults, with a much higher death rate. Who knows how this thing will mutate and how it will change if left completely unchecked to evolve in the general population.
My wife had COVID-19 in April with a medical precondition. She was in bed for three weeks. Symptoms were completely different from flu, mostly just feeling completely exhausted and weak. She went back to work after about a month, and now her health is back 90% I would say.
A few year agao I had a bad case of flu. Temperature rose again after a few days, which indicated a bacterial superinfection, which got treated with antibiotics. I was back at work after two weeks. But I have the feeling that these two weeks had changed by body. It took me about half a year to fully recover, i would say.
We often discuss who was hit worse, my wife with COVID-19 or me with the flu. Probably my wife, but she had her medical precondition, so we have not come to a final conclusion.
Your CDC link is not that different than the OP's statement "So yes, Covid-19 sounds kind of like that bad flu. It is bad, but 2 years ago we would just call it "a bad flu"."
From your link:
- People at risk: Both COVID-19 and flu illness can result in severe illness and complications. 1) The risk of complications for healthy children is higher for flu compared to COVID-19. 2) However, infants and children with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk for both flu and COVID-19.
- Complications: 1) Both COVID-19 and flu can result in complications, including... 2) Additional complications associated with COVID-19 can include: Blood clots in the veins and arteries of the lungs, heart, legs or brain. Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C)
Is Covid worse? Yes, but there are a lot of similarities between the two and for healthy young children, the flu is a bigger risk, but for children with underlying medical condition, Covid is a bigger risk.
I am a person who understands the difference between personal opinion, social norm and rules.
I understand that we do not know enough about Covid-19 yet and that the best way to act right now is by taking necessary precaution to reduce spreading the virus. In this case I accept that my personal opinion is less relevant than the social and political decisions and thus I stick to the rules and recommendations of my local government. I am still allowed to have an opinion on things and a different point of view than the politics and most of society, though.
People die from flu every year. Flu can be bad at any time. I myself had a bad flu back in January, with fever, chills, and loss of appetite for a few days, and a cough that lingered for weeks. I'm just glad I got it in January and not in March. At the worst of the flu I just kept hoping I wouldn't develop pneumonia, because pneumonia is actually deadly. I would've been worried out of my mind if I had those symptoms in March or later.
Pneumonia that comes with flu is usually a bacterial superinfection that can be treated quite well with antibiotics. If you have the flu, your temperature goes down after two or three days, but then raises again, you probably have a bacterial superinfection and should consult a doctor.
These bacterial superinfections also caused most of the deaths from the Spanish Flu. At that time antibiotics did not exist.
You had a bad flu, once and that make you think flu is as bad as covid-19?
This isn't just one bad case, it's millions of bad cases. There's no flu that killed that many people in that short of time, ever.
From a quick research, it seems like the flu kill between 12k and 61k people annually in the US. The US is now near 3x the worst estimate and the year is still young, and that's with all the precaution the US is taking against the virus.
Personally I hope that this pandemic also makes us improve how we deal with the flu season. Wearing a mask at the supermarket during a season ins't that bad. Seeing more disinfection too isn't bad. More remote works too.
> So yes, Covid-19 sounds kind of like that bad flu. It is bad, but 2 years ago we would just call it "a bad flu".
Well, there's another side to that coin:
"The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans."
This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much. Every allergy attack I've gotten throughout the summer has plunged me into fear I've got it, or every slight cough.
Honestly I was starting to think the dread of the virus was worse than the virus itself, but the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.
Has anyone here had it? Especially as a younger person I read the advice saying things like "the risk is low" but I'm terrified of having to face this.
I work for a large metro fire department/EMS. We have had lots (<30) of people under 50 get it. Nobody has been hospitalized and most report that it was a sucky flu. We had a retiree who was overweight, with diabetes get it at the ER where he worked as a Paramedic... he had a significantly different experience being placed on a vent and coding several times. He is still kicking however!
Long and short; You can only control what you can control... which is to say not much. Take precaution, but fear is occupying space in your mind rent free. I don't know about you, but I charge for space there.
My roommates (likely) had it while I quarantined for a few months in a different location early on in this pandemic.
Their experience was extreme fatigue (totally exhausted going up two flights of stairs), moderate cough, and a very high fever they’re both healthy early-30s.
Everything I have read seems to indicate the severity is heavily tied to your viral load. If you get a lot of the virus your body has to fight harder than a small amount. This is part if the reason masks and avoiding indoor spaces seems to help.
Edit: They both recovered but one roommate says it took about eight weeks to feel “normal” again. No apparent long term damage, but we shall see.
I'm at the tail end of it now. Or at least I hope I am.
It started about three weeks (wait, is it four?) ago with a high fever, migraine, back aches, and fatigue. Then a few days later I started getting a bit of a soar throat, and a few days after that I lost my sense of smell and taste in about a day -- and that's when I knew. A few days later I took a test which four days later came back positive.
My wife and daughter were both sick as well. My wife's symptoms mimicking mine, but offset by two days. My daughter, well... kids are invincible, also being 3 she lacks the vocabulary to communicate much more than this and that hurts. She had a fever and a head ache for a few days.
The fever, migraine and bed rest lasted about a week and a half.
They were both given the all clear last week, while I got put on antibiotics and an inhaler because I was displaying some indications that it was migrating to my lunges. I seem to be in the clear now.
I'm 38 and a C level exec at a startup in a critical phase, and I am afraid to say that I've been defunct since this thing started. The fatigue has been crushing. But it seems to be mental fatigue and not a physical one (well, after the first week at least). I've been doing gardening and started a gazebo construction project while this was going on (being idle makes me go a bit nuts), sweating like a manic under the sub-tropical sun, but I've hit brick walls as soon as I've tried to focus on anything more complex than "man beat tree, tree fall down".
I can't focus on anything complex for more than a little while. Today I stubbornly started debugging an issue, but after my initial findings, and realizing it was a slightly complex problem, I had to hand it over to a coworker as I was completely wrecked after 10 minutes of focusing -- and this was the most work I've done in weeks.
I see some improvement every day, but it is very frustrating not being able to get any real work done.
It's scares me that it has had this big effect on me even if I had a comparatively mild case. I can't imagine what other people are going through.
> the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.
There's a selection bias at play here though, a first-hand account of someone who suffered horribly is more "interesting" to the general reader (i.e. more people click, publisher make more money on ads).
Articles like this don’t take into account the bigger perspective. They are all very anecdotal. In the same way, I can tell you that I know many people who got it and experienced none of these very unpleasant symptoms.
>This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much.
In the end, almost everyone is gonna get it anyway for it to stop spreading, precautions or not. Lockdown/masks/etc are more about flattening the curve (spreading the infections) than about people not getting it ever.
And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
> And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
This is not entirely true. There was no economic incentive for the previous ones but this one is different. We are able to successfully develop vaccines for Coronavirus related diseases in animals. The main problem is upper respiratory tract is a hard area for the immune system to protect.
There’s honestly very little incentive to produce a vaccine for most coronaviruses. The common human ones cause the cold, but there are a bunch of them, and they’re a minority of the viruses that cause the cold. No-one wants a vaccine that reduces their chances of getting the cold by a couple percent, and that’s all a specific vaccine would be for most coronaviruses.
There is an animal coronavirus vaccine that works. Human coronaviruses, until now, either disappeared from the face of the earth (SARS) or are simply not very bad (cold), so there is literally no market for a human coronavirus vaccine, and therefore no reason to make one, until now. It costs at least a billion to make a human coronavirus vaccine, no company can just snap their fingers and spend a billion dollars for no reason. We now have a reason. It is not pollyanna to expect a coronavirus vaccine in the next 6-12 months.
> And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
I’d be careful with comparison to other coronaviruses. No one is investing heavily into a vaccine against the common cold. Not many people would get vaccinated - seeing how hard it is to convince people to get a flu shot. There’s much more interest in a COVID-19 vaccine. That doesn’t mean we’ll get one, but drawing the conclusion from “we don’t have one against the common cold, so we won’t get one against COVID-19” is stretching thing.
Here are a couple of links from the CDC. You listen to too much news if you think that young people are at risk. For [0] you should do weekly deaths by age. You'll see that under 25 people are dying at the lowest rate in the past 5 years. For 26-45 you can bet your bottom dollar that the minor bump above is the 40-45 range.
If you get it, regardless of your age, there's a relatively high probability that you will directly and indirectly infect enough people to kill at least one person. I don't want that responsibility on my conscience.
Also, while the data on this for for COVID-19 is obviously limited at this point, the long-term impacts of SARS and MERS on cardiovascular health [0] are concerning. I wouldn't be surprised if getting it knocks a couple years off of life expectancy for a 25 year old.
"As shown, deaths in young people (from babies to college students) are almost non-existent. The first age group to provide a substantial contribution to the death toll is 45-54 years, who contribute nearly 5% of all coronavirus deaths. More than 80% of deaths occur in people aged 65 and over. That increases to over 92% if the 55-64 age group is included."
"The estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."
"Among the 0-4 year, 5-17 year, 18-49 year, 50-64 year, and ≥ 65 year age groups, the highest rate of hospitalization was among adults aged ≥ 65 years, followed by adults aged 50-64 years and adults aged 18-49 years."
"The paper found that the fatality rate gradually increases with age. For example, there were no deaths among children aged nine or younger while it stood at 0.2 percent for people aged between 10 and 39. It increased to 3.6 percent in the 60-69 age bracket before rising to 8 percent among those aged 70 to 79 and 14.8 percent among people in their 80s or older."
I see it differently. Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death. To say, "you young person, you'll be fine". Is inaccurate. To say, you will most likely be fine. Yeah, sure that's accurate, but some of those people will actually die. Let's not candy coat that. Death is permanent and awful.
"Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death."
You may believe this to be true, but your sense of risk is ridiculously out of proportion to the actual risk involved. In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid:
It seems like the much more likely and scary scenario for young people (myself included) is long term health problems that are difficult or impossible to treat and basically destroy your quality of life.
I was curious if you have done any research on that? I keep hoping to find something to put my mind at ease.
When in history have we ever seen a disease where doctors, the public, or the media said "living in fear for your life is a good idea if you contract this disease?"
If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine? And yet all of society has turned this idea on its head when it comes to coronavirus. One report after another about how horrific it is. Constant anxiety and fear that takes a real toll on people.
Yes it's worse than the flu, if we take the stats in Los Angeles for example about 2.5% of confirmed cases have died. (Based on this it's a fair guess that less than 1% of all cases, including the unreported ones, have died.) Many people like the author have severe symptoms and then recover.
I have to wonder if this aberrant response to coronavirus says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself. A 24/7 stream of corona terror is being pushed into our eyeballs. How does that help anyone, especially the people who get sick? Does panic, fear, and a response straight from our lizard brains help us end the pandemic? Who decided that mass terror was the best way to beat it? I didn't sign up for this strategy and I bet you didn't either.
It's a bit misleading to say this "says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself", although it is no Ebola for sure. To me, it seems to be somewhere (disturbingly) in the middle -- a low apparent CFR and yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time. Perhaps it's too early to tell and we should be cautious and reserve our judgment?
Nevermind "should" -- we should definitely be cautious, observe and reserve our judgment. It's good to be skeptical. But, draw a line at careless speculation.
"yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time."
Fact check: there is no evidence of this. Even otherwise reputable sources are trading in anecdotes, and relying heavily on "may" and "could" to spread fear:
1% of 300 million is 3 million, I think that’s the fear on a large scale. So dissemination of information is important, but the 24/7 news cycle not so much. It started its current cadence well before the pandemic, somewhere around mid-2015. I think it’s here to stay. Here at least we have an excuse of keeping people informed for their physical health, even though the amount of new knowledge about the virus itself is vanishingly small.
I feel so sorry for the sensible Americans who are trapped in America with all these idiots who want to argue about masks and downplay a disease that has already killed 175k of their compatriots in only 5 months.
Think about everything that came about because of 911 and that killed less than 3k.
Hopefully I'm just seeing an overrepresentation of the dumb ones in comments and in the media, and it's not so prevalent.
Social media gives idiots an outsized voice due to their abundance of free time. This is exacerbating in the summer, and also in a pandemic. It's further exacerbated by political opportunists trying to influence the upcoming election.
We really need to construct better social media platforms. Ones that reward nuance, constructive discourse, experience, etc...
You can go to /r/covid19positive and read experiences of 100s of People. If all of their experiences Combined are still anecdotal to you, may be consider 170,000 people have died and 5 million people are infected in US alone.
5 million confirmed cases, not current, most of which are recovered by this point. Likely a much larger number total, though. I don't think we have the data about the severity of each of those cases to really know much.
It's deadly in some situations (enough to make this a very serious disease), serious in others, and mild in many more. As for the exact numbers, who knows?
There's absolutely a selection bias in places like that subreddit though, as the people most likely to be there are those with serious cases.
I value one anecdote from a proper journalist more than a thousand Reddit posts. It might be the case that half of Reddit's users are actually truthful, but since half are pathological liars, I consider the site entirely worthless for this sort of information. There's no surefire way to know which half is which.
It seems he was inside in that diner; as far as I read the latest, that is a risk factor, so it might not be his friends (only) that gave him a critical dose. If you have to do something, do it outside, preferably with a good breeze and keep distance. Diners are almost impossible to social distance when you sit inside and most places are hard to ventilate. Also wearing a mask protect others, not yourself (he seems to say he thinks the latter).
it all started with my knees feeling suddenly sore for no reason. A few hours later I started to cough and develop a fever and my whole body hurt. By the next day I was in agony and my head was so hot it felt like it was going to pop like a zit. I lost my sense of smell / taste, which added to the difficulties of eating because I couldn't sit up or stop coughing. After 2 weeks I was down 40 lbs and had pneumonia in both lungs. Recovery started after about a month and a half and was difficult. Walking more than 20 feet was hard, but eventually I made a full recovery.
This was in 2012, and was not Covid-19. There will people who get it easy and get it hard. That happens with all diseases, and covid-19 is no different. I'm not saying it's not dangerous, especially if you are older, but acting like its some sage advice to watch out because this one person got it bad, when we do know that the majority of people dont. especially if young. I think this doom and gloom does more harm than good and prevents us from taking steps to handle the virus appropriately.
That's not a great assumption. Coronaviruses and other non-lethal viruses make people sick often, and because they aren't deadly, are not well researched and almost never diagnosed.
Lucky to have a mild case in mid-March. Would really suck to have to worry about it for six+ months.
I’m older but in decent shape. Had the blahs and burning sandy then stiff lungs for a week. Definitely been sicker though. Basically shook it off.
Been taking vitamin D3 for a few years. That week I took 5-10k D3 a day, 1k% vitamin C + zinc, etc think airborne or Emergen C +. Believe it was what gave me the edge. By coincidence I take a baby aspirin as a blood thinner; it can help avoid blood clots.
During the worst I’d say I lost 50% of my lung capacity. About 2% of the irritated lungs persists, goes up to 5% if I drink too much or don’t take my vitamins. I don’t notice anymore unless I pay attention.
One thing that does seem to be rarely mentioned is the weird rashes Covid can cause. My son and I both had a strange rash on our knees and feet that I’ve never experienced before. It looked exactly like the erythemato-papular or erythemato-vesicular rash described here [1]. For me this was the only symptom that differentiated Covid from a bad cold.
My friend is in his 50s and had it (tested positive along with his girlfriend who he lives with). He said he felt crappy for about a week, then got better. Moderately athletic and mildly overweight, but not obese. No lasting effects on his health.
How exactly would he know that? From all the information going around the virus might do some nasty things to your body, which manifest themselves years later.
And here's a quote from the link you may consider before making snide comments:
"While covid-19 can almost be asymptomatic it can also lead to serious damage to the lungs and heart. Two organs that must be in perfect working condition for our diving activity. We will have to be very careful before resuming the activity."
He ran a sustained 102 F fever, had chills so bad he chipped a tooth, lost two of senses, and shed a pound a day for several days. And his case was mild.
> His case is also not typical for most people who get it.
I'm not sure you are right on that. The author reported a fever, coughing, fatigue, and difficulties concentrating. He didn't reported loss of consciousness nor strokes nor organ failure nor heart attacks. By the author's own words, he felt like his case didn't justified a trip to the hospital. That's pretty much the definition of a mild run-of-the-mill covid19 case.
I don't see the point you're trying to make. Perhaps you want to interpret asymptomatic cases, or presymptomatic cases as mild. That's something no one in the world does because by definition mild cases are cases where you experience mild symptoms.
The point I was trying to (poorly) make, is that if 40% of posts are asymptomatic, the median case is probably extremely mild (unless as soon as people have symptoms they are very serious, which seems unlikely).
He "thought" he chipped a tooth, which means he didn't actually. It's all just a bunch of emotionally manipulative language, which obviously had its intended effect.
I’ve lost more weight from working out in the heat due to sweat. If he’s a typical 230lb overweight sports writer that is hardly any weight to lose over four whole days.
"The loss of smell that can accompany coronavirus is unique and different from that experienced by someone with a bad cold or flu, say European researchers who have studied the experiences of patients.
...
Another thing that sets them apart is their "true" loss of taste.
It's not that their taste is somewhat impaired because their sense of smell is out of action, say the researchers in the journal Rhinology. Coronavirus patients with loss of taste really cannot tell the difference between bitter or sweet.
Experts suspect this is because the pandemic virus attacks nerve cells directly involved with smell and taste sensation."
Can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban such accounts, for what ought to be obvious reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We've also had to ask you multiple times already. That's not sporting.
No, the novel coronavirus is a virus, and a disease, and is not a statistic/agenda/debate. But, there can (and should, and is) be many statistics, agendas, debates, about a corona virus, hopefully.
That's what the construct means, that there are those things around it. It's semantics but the point is the author is implying there should be no debate because their anecdote should mean it's obvious we have to react the way the author agrees with. It's a cheap tactic to shut down opposing arguments - "This isn't a debate, this is a real issue and you can't argue with statistics blah blah fall in line with my viewpoint or you're a wrongthinker with an agenda .."
I got the bug in March and my GP (who is amazing) told me to talk to the health department and the health department told me to talk to my GP or go to the ER. I was in the middle of moving out of my house when it hit. My girlfriend was gone (she had just taken an internship) and I was alone. I was furious about my lack of options and just the bullshit from everyone being overloaded, the stress of work (I work from home) and still wanting to pack boxes to finish my move. The last 4 days of fever were the worst. I remember my last night of fever acutely. Sitting alone in my bed with a throat that felt like a sun bleached mummy of a garden hose full of glitter, hallucinating, and stupefied (the coronavirus brain fog is one of the most interesting symptoms IMO). I sent my doctor's office a message on the medical portal and said "Fuck you and fuck the fucking health department, if I die alone today I want you to know you might have been able to help." My fever broke a few hours later and I was largely functional by the next day.
I've seen my doc since, we are fine and haven't talked about my message. I'm dealing with inflammation that looks like pericarditis by a lot of blood markers but is almost invisible to anything else that would confirm it. I had a heart attack a month ago. I'm 37 and relatively fit for a console jockey. That feeling of powerlessness and isolation. The worry of giving it to anyone else even if I did ask for help... On top of that the disbelief that I was going through it and the still persistent disbelief that I get from other people if I do talk about it. I won't forget it any time soon. Especially because ever since it feels like I've got a dinner plate glued inside my chest that no one can find.
Wear a mask. We are in this for a long haul. Well, I might not be.