I think it’s 14 days after your symptoms go away, not 14 days after you start getting sick. Please stay home if you can.
Which would be 28 days of isolation. That seems excessive – you sure?
The real answer is, without testing, no one really knows how long you might be infectious. This source (written by doctors for doctors) says wait at least 3 days after you are better, but says that WHO recommends 14 days after you are better. (bloding mine)
Can a friend bring groceries to your doorstep? Can you work from home?
I (and many others) have been isolated for 28 days.
Excessive? No. Smart? Yes.
Thank goodness it wasn’t a link to this one–it would have been a clear sign of an advanced brain tumor.
Well, there’s the rub. I never ran a fever, didn’t have respiratory symptoms, and I don’t have a positive test, so none of those descriptions seems to apply. What I did have was nausea and eight days of diarrhea, which went away five days ago leaving me feeling like heck for 2 1/2 more days but with no symptoms. I don’t know that it was Covid but this sounds like what ‘mild’ symptoms are like in some people.
I do work from home and I don’t have anyone who can bring me groceries. But I have enough food to hold out for another week or so.
Instacartmight work in your area.
An update since my last post in this thread.
I ultimately did not lose my part-time student job, although I’m working about half the hours I used to (10/wk instead of 20/wk). I also learned that my upcoming Summer internship is still good to go.
I’m a full-time student and this Spring term all classes are online. I’m taking four courses so I’m spending a lot of hours each day at the computer either in Zoom meetings, or watching narrated slides. I submit my homework by taking pictures of it with my phone (I have no scanner, so I use a purpose-made app for photographing documents) and uploading the PDFs to Canvas (the school’s choice of online course content delivery). I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and that no matter how much work I put into school each day, I’m not making any progress. I’m hearing that maybe the upcoming Fall term will be more of the same, and I’m not sure I’m mentally capable of keeping this up for another term. Maybe the Summer break will help.
When the weather permits I go for bike rides on the street as this is the easiest way for me to be outdoors without getting too close to others. Riding around campus is nice because it’s basically empty and there’s no vehicle traffic on the campus streets. I’ve gone grocery shopping twice in the last six weeks or so and I’m hoping the next time I go, there will be some toilet paper available. I should be good for another 2-3 weeks but it was only by shear luck I bought a pack as part of my regular shopping just before everything hit the fan.
Otherwise I’m staying healthy, if not sane.
I’ve had a mild sore throat for about a week, some congestion but no fever. Slight difficulty breathing. I have that kinda-sick feeling, like I’m coming down with something. But it never materializes, the same day after day. What worries me is that I’m in the high-risk category. If this becomes the full-blown virus it’s serious.
If this is as bad as it gets, I can live with it for the duration. The LAST think I want to do is go to a healthcare facility.
My husband, who is younger but still high-risk, has no symptoms. At this point it would be senseless to isolate from him, since we’ve been together 24/7 for 3 weeks.
Link to Inigo Montoya’s thread — he went through having the virus, and now his wife has it, and she might have been admitted to an emergency room by now. 
I agree, squeegee, that does not sound fun. Whatever it was, I’m glad you beat it.
In this post you will see the word worker a few times. I know that the workers are medical professinals, but I do not know if they are Registered Nurses, another type of nurse, or what level of medical care professional. I therefore opted to go with worker instead of nurse or doctor.
Wednesday, my school got word from the city government that the school staff would be tested the very next day for “nucleic acid testing”. This testing is required by the government two weeks prior to staff and student return to campuses. The test site is a high school connected with a university and therefore technically on the university’s campus. The navigation apps all give directions to the listed address of the high school, which, of course, is the same as the university. That took everyone to the opposite side of the campus. Since everything’s locked down at the university, we had to go all the way around the campus, to the other side of the neighborhood. Luckily for me, the place is quite close to my apartment so I scootered to and then around the perimeter of the campus.
Once I got in the herd, er, milling crowd, er line to enter, I was informed that I need to (a) wear a mask, (b) show school ID card, (c) for Chinese nationals, show their national identification card, and for foreigners show passport with visa and accommodation registration form, and (d) display the day’s result for the Beijing Health Kit mini-program. I had no problem with any of that, but a number of people had to fall back to the end of the line to activate the mini-program and I think one foreigner had to go fetch at least one of the above documents.
On the actual campus, there were tapeed lines on the sidewalk exactly one meter apart to aid with keeping the “social distance”. The lines (golden yellow giving rise to a number of jokes from some of the Chinese staff that it’s like the yellow brick road) guided the herd/milling crowd/line into the gymnasium. Just inside the gym, there was a rather long cafeteria table set up with just three workers there, all the workers were dressed in hazmat gear.
I went to the open station at the table and the woman at that station asked me to lower my mask for a moment so she could verify I am the person on my documents, show the health kit result, and give her my documents. She checked everything and then asked me which part of my name I would like to be entered into their system since my full name has six syllables, a wee bit more than the usual two or three syllables of a Chinese full name. When I told her to use my middle name (one syllable), there was an audible sigh and she thanked me. She then punched a bunch of data into her computer, printed out a barcode sticker for a vial, put the sticker on the vial, handed me the vial, and directed me to the testing station.
The gymnasium floor (mind you, this is not a small gym) was sectioned off with police tape into four sections. Each section had one chair in the dead center of the section and, of course there was a worker in hazmat gear standing in front of the chair. I entered the section with an unoccupied chair, handed the vial to the worker, and sat down. The worker directed me to lower my mask, look straight up at the ceiling, open my mouth wide, and stick my tongue out. He then took a damn long Q-tip and gently rammed that thing down about to my Adam’s apple. I have a pretty healthy gag reflexl (as in easily triggered) so I kind of gurgled during this process. He removed the Q-tip from my throat, cut off the swab end, perhaps five centimeters of it, placed that in the vial, showed me that he sealed it, put the vial in a tray, and sent me on my way. On the way out, I heard a number of people asking when we would find out the results. My comment was, “All you have to worry about is a knock on the door”.
You might have read my post upthread about the school’s announced return date. In with all the instructions for getting to the test site, there was a casual mention that although the students will be returning on 10 May (12th grade) and 11 May (9th grade), all high school staff, regardless of grade said staff are teaching, must report to the campus on 6 May. One might be forgiven for thinking that particular bit of minutia would be deserving of its own announcement, not buried in with a different detailed process.
The testing did not include the swab rammed up the nose, but I wonder if that might have been better than the gag-worthy process I went through. Oh, and those who are still in quarantine or are not in Beijing, even if they are in China, did not get this done on the scheduled date, obviously. Those poor sods will have to arrange for their own testing at one of the city’s designated sites and also foot the bill themselves (ranging from 100元 to 300元).
Other matters still not cleared up:
[ul][li]How many staff will actually be arriving on campus on 6 May to prepare the school for the students’ return.[/li][li]How many students will actually be returning.[/li][li]How will teachers who teach both a grade returning to campus and another grade handle the online teaching for the other grade or grades.[/li][li]Where will the online teaching be set up for the teacher. That’s a bit more complicated since there are not that many empty rooms.[/li][li]What will be done for 9th grade/12th grade teachers who cannot return to China yet so they can continue teaching their classes.[/ul][/li]
I think other issues are covered in my post upthread.
Seriously, the return to campus for eveyrone everywhere is going to be, as a friend of mine teaching in the south of China put it, “the biggest clusterfuck nightmare in all of human history”.
Damn misspelling! “Medical professionals”, not “medical professinals”.
I didn’t know they had WinCo down there. I only knew about them after moving up to Oregon.
Things are slowly returning to normal here. The stores generally seem to have TP now, even if there are gaps along the shelves and the choice of brands/products is somewhat reduced. I’ve been buying a 6-, 9-, or 12-pack slightly oftener than once a week, thinking that I’ll build up a supply in order to be ready for the second wave. But I only buy one package at a time, and there’s always plenty left. Nor am I seeing any shortages of any food products.
What’s a problem now is PPE and related products like Lysol spray. We have three or four masks that we recycle by spraying with Lysol and then running through a hot dryer, but that small can of Lysol won’t last for ever.
Can’t visit my girlfriend, who is in another state at the moment.
Anyone know if Amtrak train or Greyhound bus are any safer than flying in an airplane, or are they all equally Covid-risky?
Can’t answer for The Dog but on Amtrak ridership has been reduced to the point where it’s only a handful of people per car. One of my shut-in activities has been watching the westbound Southwest Chief’s arrival at Flagstaff on Virtual Railfan. BV* people climbing aboard would be a couple dozen; it’s now one or two at most and more than half the time it’s nobody at all.
Food service has been reduced to the detested Flex Dining which means coach passengers will be paying a fairly stiff price for what amounts to airliner food, but they will bring it to your seat. It’s complimentary for sleeper passengers.
Sanitizing protocols seem to be in effect – at least I’ve seen the attendants on the platform wearing masks and even when they were stuck for an hour last night fixing a problem, the conductor kept his on. The engine crew did not have masks, though.
*Before Virus.
I was out today for other reasons but on the way home I thought I’d stop at a Walmart that was conveniently on the way – not my local one. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick – now freaking Walmart has controlled access with a long lineup in front! Mind you, it’s a nice warm Saturday afternoon, and it may be different during the week. I just turned around and continued home.
I normally detest Walmart but their purchasing power can sometimes do wonders – one Walmart was where by sheer luck and good timing I found a new shipment of good quality* hand sanitizer when it was available nowhere else for love or money, and large refills of my standard liquid hand and shower soap that was equally hard to find. If my local Walmart also has lineups during a weekday morning, then to hell with them.
–
- Good quality meaning although I’d never heard of the brand or the Canadian company that made it, it was specifically on the list of sanitizers approved by Health Canada as effective against COVID-19. It turns out to be the same stuff that many drugstores sell as their house brand of hand sanitizer, the only problem being that none of them ever have any.
My nostril scraping came back negative. Congrats all around, but I liked it better when I thought I’d had it and could say that I’d been sicker. now I have the real thing hanging over me, with two fatalities already here.
Buck up, laddie. There’s still plenty of time for you to catch it.
Way back on 9 April 2020, I posted some documents to Florida. The tracking site says the package is still in Beijing. So, this afternoon, I head to the post office to enquire. The clerk informs me that, yes, the package is still in China and it is not known when they will actually head to the US as there is now only one cargo plane per month out of Beijing to the US.