I had covid rebound and i took some other antiviral
I had covid rebound, and i didn’t take antivirals, just stuff for symptoms or nothing
I had covid, no rebound, and i took paxlovid
I had covid, no rebound, and i took some other antiviral
I had covid, no rebound, and i didn’t take antivirals, just stuff for symptoms or nothing
No covid for me (yet)
0voters
If you’ve had covid multiple times, vote based on your most recent confirmed bout.
There’s a bias baked into the poll because it’s likely that there’s a correlation between people likely to get rebound and people likely to be prescribed antivirals. But so far, every person i know who has had rebound took paxlovid, and i wonder how widespread that is. (I know several couples where one took paxlovid and the other didn’t, and the one who took it had rebound.)
feel better, (may test negative or show a very faint line on an antigen test, but i don’t think that’s required for the definition)
then feel sick again, and test positive
It’s pretty common. It was in the news when it happened to President Biden. It’s happened to a lot of my older friends. (Older means “my age”. I have a lot of younger friends and i don’t think any had rebound.)
I was talking to somebody IRL (I do that occasionally) recently about the widely varying genetic susceptibility to bad COVID. Whether somebody just gets a particularly nasty dead-end strain of virus or the issue is more with the virus’s fit to their own genetics is still a mystery. But some otherwise healthy people get killed or nearly so, and some otherwise health-iffy people get the sniffles.
'Tis a crapshoot for sure. Like the rest of life. To be sure, all of the COVID hazard is additive to all the other hazards we had in 2018. One thing’s for sure: COVID in all its varied and ever-mutating forms will be a feature of the human landscape for all remaining eternity. We’ve been dealing with flu now for 1-2 millennia. We are past the acute phase of pandemic spread and now it’s simply the permanent chronic reality that it’s everywhere amongst us all.
Research is ongoing, but there’s some reason to think that rebound is just a general COVID thing unrelated to Paxlovid. At the least, it seems that the public emphasis on Paxlovid as a cause of rebound is exaggerated.
I had Covid, and started taking Paxlovid on the second day of symptoms. After five days, which is how long it takes to finish the Paxlovid, I felt 95% well and started leaving the house for brief shopping trips while masked. After two days of that, I rebounded hard, showed a fever of 101 degrees, my head congested as solid as cement, and I lost my sense of smell. I stayed isolated for another five days before venturing out again. It took another two weeks before my sense of smell returned.
I had a Paxlovid rebound, but really the taste of Paxlovid was far worse than the rebound. Here is how I recall it:
Day:
1- Felt a bit under, not too bad
2 - Same, took test postive in the PM
3 - Took Paxlovid in the morning, massive covid symptoms during the day, at 8pm symptoms lifted and felt much better
4 - felt pretty close to 100%, still test positive
5 - Felt better still +
6 - Paxlovid taste getting out of hand, felt normal test +
7 - Normal, last day of Paxlovid bad taste test negative
8 - Normal bad taste gone
9 - Normal
10 - Normal
11 - mild symptoms test +
12 - mild symptoms test +
13 - normal test -
life goes on…
I said I’d taken Paxlovid and had no rebound. While that’s technically true, I suspect I was most of the way done with COVID when they gave me the Paxlovid.
I was actually in the hospital with severe cellulitis and an infected elbow bursa in my left arm. I just happened to have also had COVID when the arm started to be noticeable. By the time that the arm became a problem, the COVID had mostly run its course. I ended up in the hospital (104 fever- much higher than the COVID fever) and felt like hammered crap. They wanted to give me the Paxlovid, so I agreed, but my oxygen saturation was like 99% and I wasn’t having any other issues at that point- just the arm swelling and slight fever after a day on IV antibiotics.
Once I was out of the hospital, no COVID rebound of any kind- I felt wonderful after about a week of COVID, then another week of waning COVID and a serious infection.
My SO and I both tested positive a couple of weeks ago. I had a very mild case, and my only treatment was a day of ibuprofin and rest. My SO got Paxlovid, felt better, but is currently sick with what may or may not involve Covid rebound.
I did take Paxlovid the first (and, so far as I know, the only) time I came down with COVID, in May of last year, and I experienced COVID rebound.
I’d learned, on a Wednesday, that someone I’d been playing a role-playing game with on the prior day had just tested positive for COVID. I started feeling a little punked on Saturday, felt grosser on Sunday, tested positive, went to the urgent care clinic, and got a Paxlovid prescription that day.
My symptoms during “round 1” were mild: no fever, a bit of a cough and wheezing in my chest (they also gave me an albuterol inhaler, which helped), and general fatigue, all for just a couple of days. By Thursday, I was symptom-free, and I tested negative on a home test by Friday or Saturday.
But, about 7 days after that, I started feeling sick again, which was apparently COVID rebound, as I tested positive again. This time, it was up in my head and sinuses, and for about three days, I had the worst sinus headaches I’ve ever experienced in my life; sleeping was nearly impossible due to it.
I was curious about this and what the mechanism might be. I found this study indicating Covid-19 does impact DM risk. They reviewed the diagnostic coding of some 20K patients(1) who’d gotten Covid and did a look back/forward of 90 days each, essentially noting how many had had DM onset in the 90 days prior to getting covid, versus how many had their DM onset within the 90 days following Covid.
Although the primary variants would have been alpha-beta-delta, there was still some Omicron exposure (study capped as of June 2022).
“Although we don’t yet know for certain, the trends and patterns that we see in the data suggest that COVID-19 infection could be acting in certain settings like a disease accelerator, amplifying risk for a diagnosis that individuals might have otherwise received later in life,” said Cheng, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women’s Cardiovascular Health and Population Science. “So, it could be that instead of being diagnosed with diabetes by age 65, a person with preexisting risk for diabetes might—after a COVID-19 infection—be more likely to develop diabetes by age 45 or 55.”
The good news (in general, I mean, but of course no help for your friend) is that the risk appears to be on the order of 1% increase if vaccinated (vs. 2.7% increased risk if unvaccinated).
(1) Yes, I know, small sample size and possible ascertainment bias etc., which the authors acknowledge.
It found an increased risk of both diabetes and taking drugs to control blood sugar.
Compared to the contemporary control group, 30-day survivors of COVID-19 exhibited an increased risk (HR 1·40, 95% CI 1·36–1·44) and excess burden (13·46, 95% CI 12·11–14·84, per 1000 people at 12 months) of incident diabetes; and an increased risk (1·85, 1·78–1·92) and excess burden (12·35, 11·36–13·38) of incident antihyperglycaemic use. Analyses to estimate the risk of a composite endpoint of incident diabetes or antihyperglycaemic use yielded a HR of 1·46 (95% CI 1·43–1·50) and an excess burden of 18·03 (16·59–19·51) per 1000 people at 12 months (figure 1 and appendix pp 4, 12).
Or a 40% increase in the odds of developing diabetes/ ~ 13 more cases per thousand people after having covid.
They concluded that checking for new blood sugar regularly issues should be a standard part of post-covid care.
I think there’s quite a lot of evidence by now that covid increases your risk for diabetes.
What my friend actually said wasn’t that covid gave her diabetes, but that she’s been having trouble regulating her blood sugar levels since having covid, and hopes it improves, but in the meantime she didn’t want to eat whatever had just been offered.
