I also am bad at this. I probably have a fever less than half the time I feel feverish. And on the flip side I once had a fever of 104 without realizing it - it was only when I started to hallucinate and friends made me take my temperature that clued me in.
I’m not even sure what having a fever is supposed to feel like anymore. When I was a kid, if I felt “hot” and my mom touched my forehead and said I felt hot, that meant I had a fever. These days, I feel like I’m burning up, I’m sore all over, I have no appetite, I take my temperature, and it comes back 97.8. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I felt sick and had a measurably elevated temperature.
I fear reporting a fever because I’m metric, but my doctor from a metric country is forced to work in US units and doesn’t appreciate the rounding errors from converting back and forth.
Seriously, medicine, you’re a fucking science, get on board with the metric system, please.
Really? Metric, 100 degrees between freezing and boiling. Fahrenheit, 180 degrees or almost twice as many increments between freezing and boiling. Which one sounds more precise to you?
But freezing is 32, not 0, so (180-32)=148 increments. Still more, but not twice as many.
No. The freezing point of water is 32F, the boiling point of water is 212F (both at 1 atm), a difference of 180 degrees Fahrenheit.
I actually used a calculator to subtract 32 from 212.
Sorry for the hijack BTW
I had one of those “point at you, don’t touch” thermometers I used at work. I developed the habit of pointing it at myself whenever I took nervous clients temperatures. The thing had a memory of ten or so temps, and ten “patients” I could select before taking. I was 0. Since I had 24 regular clients I kept their temps on paper, and cleared the patient number when I wrote it down. I checked after a fairly busy week, once, and noticed that my temp looked pretty random after the first two digits which stayed on 97. Suspiciously non bell curve distribution. It was an indoor job, mostly in three rooms. Made me suspicious about the medical significance of that third digit.
Considering the existence of fractional numbers, how stupid is your question?
I posted a question shortly before COVID19 asking why people even bothered owning thermometers, since you can easily tell when you have a fever. I was surprised to find out people do not universally know their body temp.
I’ve never taken my temperature and been surprised by the results.
That, I think, is the biggest reason for people wanting temp checks at businesses. I’ve already heard and read dozens of stories of people saying they thought they may be coming down with the virus but before they talked to a doctor, they got all their shopping out of the way.
Regarding having a fever for other reasons, sure, non-medical people armed with uncalibrated thermometers and using it as the sole means of deciding whether or not someone should be allowed into a store is going to catch a lot of false positives (and miss a lot of actual positives from asymptomatic or not yet symptomatic people). But it’s probably better than nothing.
Also, if you actually have something like a diagnosed UTI, your doctor won’t have a problem writing a note for you to carry around. In the food industry I can’t let my employees near food if they have a fever. However, if I have a note from a doctor stating that their fever isn’t due to anything contagious/foodborne and they should be allowed to return to work, then they’re good to go.
Same here. If every business required a temp check and you had a UTI, a simple note from your doctor stating that you have a fever due to a non-contagious illness, technically, should get you past the bouncers.
Taking my temperature would most likely be a fruitless endeavor because I just don’t seem to get a fever when I’m sick even with the flu. I’d most likely infect and kill you after I “passed” the temp test.
And of course, the only reason we think of “98.6 ºF” (a measurement using a fractional degree) as “normal” is because that’s the Fahrenheit conversion of 37 ºC (a measurement rounded to an integer degree).
Me having a fever is so rare, I’m really not sure. Not that I actually have a thermometer to check, even if I was suspicious. Last fever I knew of was about 11 or 12 years ago.
First, let me say that my wife never knows when she has a fever. She finds out later, because she usually gets some skin mottling.
Second, it’s a weird question. I know when I feel feverish and will check and I’ll have a fever, every time. So, I get few if any false positives.
However, I don’t check my temperature every day, so it’s possible I have fevers that I don’t know about because I don’t feel feverish. That is, I don’t know how many false negatives I have. (The “negative” being I don’t feel feverish even though I have a fever)
OP, do you know what I’m saying? Like you, I have very specific symptoms that tell me I have a fever. But it’s certainly possible that there are other times that I have a fever and don’t know it, since I don’t take my temperature daily. Could it be the same with you? Wouldn’t that make testing everyone more sensible?
I can’t tell when I have a fever. It’s so bad that I’ve woken up complaining of a lousy night’s sleep because “I was hot, I was cold, I was shivering, then I was sweating” and my roommate had to say “Did you take your temperature?” Sure enough, 103 and off to the doctor I went.
But If I touch another person’s face I can usually tell quite accurately what their temperature is. I’ve only been off once, by one degree. And there have been several times when I’ve shaken someone’s hand, or hugged them, or something and said “You all right? You’ve got a fever” and they thought I was crazy, but the thermometer proved me right. (One of those might have died if I hadn’t gotten her to the hospital.)
Seems like you can tell when you have a fever – you’re hot, cold, shivering, and sweating.
Yes, I did clarify this in Post 5. Like many people, it’s rare that I even get a fever. I don’t remember anything over 100 in my adult life. I only check if I have a sore throat or headache, which until my recent torture with shingles, are really the only symptoms of illness I ever get. The symptoms I described have always been the reliable distinguishing factors. I did get a 99.5 degree fever along with the shingles, and I was also able to predict this before the temp reading. BTW, get your shingles vaccine people! I’m 4 weeks into this, and still can’t sleep more than 3 hours before getting woken up by stabbing or pinprick like pain at random areas of my torso.
Sometimes I can tell, but sometimes I can’t. It’s usually secondary indicators that I notice, not the fever itself. You notice chills when the fever is starting, and you notice being hot and sweaty when the fever is breaking, but a steady fever is not that noticeable.
I had a fever about a month ago, and if not for feeling cold around the start of it, I would not have known. I recognized that I was feeling kinda crappy, but I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep for a few days, and sometimes that’s enough to feel crappy. I then felt cold and put a sweatshirt on. I noticed that other people in my house weren’t dressed as warmly, but people don’t always perceive temperature the same. Because we’re in the middle of a damn pandemic, I took my temperature and it was 101.
For the next few days I took my temperature regularly, and I would not have been able to tell you when I was feverish or by how much. I never had the hot/sweating that happens sometimes when a fever breaks, it just went away slowly (or maybe at night and I slept through it). I continued feeling crappy after my fever subsided. If the initial chills had happened at night or I weren’t paying attention to the pandemic I might not have taken my temperature.
Short answer, yes. Lots of folks with fever are unaware.
With Covid, some people have very low oxygen levels and don’t seem to know it. Usually, people would feel very anxious and be breathing differently.
And it has been impossible to buy a thermometer here for the last few months.