DH, DD, DW & DS get used, because H, D, W & S are the kind of initials that people use to stand for names. People say SIL, BIL, SF, SSP, all the time without comment. I still don’t know what MMP is, but I don’t care enough to ask.
People use FTR, FTF, IANAD, IMO, and OMG without comment. To me, DH, DD, etc., and just as common.
But yeah, FTR, I am married to David Hasselhoff-- just not THAT David Hasselhoff.
No, seriously, I refer to my husband as DH, because he doesn’t like it when I use his name on MB posts.
A question for the doctors here: Is the difference between an asymptomatic case and a symptomatic one related to the viral load acquired at the time of infection? Say someone gets the infection through a contaminated surface, and another through working closely with an infected person without effective protection. The first person obtains a tiny viral load, and the second a large load through repeated exposure. Does this mode of acquisition correlate to the severity of the disease - will the second case suffer a more severe disease?
RivkahChaya, good luck and hope you feel better soon.
Oh, thanks, but I’m fine. This all went on Feb. 27-Mar. 1, to the best of my memory. Haven’t felt sick since.
Without a positive test, it’s all anecdotal.
My son works in a prison in Florida. They had a few extremely ill inmates last week that seemed to match all the COVID19 symptoms. The Health Department sent a team in to test the affected inmates. The tests came back negative for COVID19, positive for influenza.
And this is why we need a titer test of some sort, to see who’s got the antibodies - i.e. has had it and is, hopefully, now immune.
DH is something I had no issue understanding - as this has been used in my internet groups to refer to Dear (or sometimes Damned) Husband for 25+ years :).
I had a nasty cold for much of January. Caught from a friend who likely caught it in Philly around New Year’s Day. It was 3 weeks before either of us felt normal. But we didn’t have things like fever etc. so we’re pretty sure it wasn’t COVID. That, of course, did not stop me making jokes about “my neighbors who just got back from China” when I finally went to the office at the end of the month. Well, I said “I’m tempted to make jokes about…” while quickly adding “Yes, they did, but they were back well before Christmas and we have not met face to face since before then”, so everyone at the office knew I was joking (I hope!!).
I’m not sure if we had a mild case or not but my daughter and I had these symptoms last week: overall feeling tired, a mild throat pain, coughing VERY occasionally and a mild fever of 99.4, which in my book is not considered al fever to be worried about, but it made me feel tired so that’s why I checked our temps. Then it went away to comeback a day after. That’s about it and I have been feeling good for over a week. We have been in the house for 3 weeks and the only person with outside contact has been my husband which went to the supermarket to get groceries but we drastically reduced these grocery store visits last week since groceries are being delivered to us now. Who knows…
Edited to add: on the other hand, my niece truly believes she had it. She and a couple of her friends in her university dorm were sick at the beginning of March. We thought that she had Mono but the test came back negative. She had a cough, fever and a pain in her left side. Others in her dorm had the same and you know how easily diseases spread in dorms. She’s now at her house with her parents and was fully checked by their doctor and she is fine. She’s 18 years old.
Well, add me to the “confused by DH” list.
Anyway, yeah, I am looking forward to an antibody test. I, too, had “probably just a weird chest cold” with symptoms that aren’t an exact match for covid, but not inconsistent if you read the literature and how variable it is. I’m still getting over it 4 weeks later, although it’s stale enough that I’m no longer afraid this bug is going to kill me. I would be delighted to learn I have already had covid.
My daughter (who lives with me, and has the same bug) refers to it as schroedinger’s virus. We all have to act as if we have it, and are contagious, and simultaneously as if we haven’t had it, and are vulnerable.
This is why I’m annoyed at the symptoms coming one-by-one. When I had my “Lost Weekend,” it started out with GI problems. At the time, GI problems were not a known symptom. I had the taste, or rather, lack of it, but I didn’t not the date, and I don’t remember if it was during or adjacent to this weekend or not, because it also was not a known symptom.
I didn’t know stiff muscles were a symptom, or I would not have been so quick to dismiss the neck pain as due to whiplash back in October.
I didn’t take my temp, because I didn’t put these things together.
At the time that I was feeling ill, the only symptom I had that I’d heard of as a symptom was a cough, and because my nose was stuffy and runny, it was easy to assume it was post-nasal drip, because I get it all the time.
The big one I had heard of was “shortness of breath,” which as it turns out, doesn’t even mean what I thought it meant at the time. I thought it was a gasping for air, and not feeling like you could breath fast enough. Turn out it feels more like suffocation. It can involve “tightness in the chest,” whatever that means.
I just really don’t remember if I was having any trouble breathing that couldn’t be chalked up to the difficulty of a stuffy nose.
If you look up the symptoms, basically everything that is a symptom of any mild or moderate viral illness can be a symptom of covid. Sore throat, cough, stuffy nose (less than half the time, but yes), diarrhea, low fever, high fever, muscle aches, weird dreams, malaise, losing sense of smell (only 70% of the time, I read – and a symptom I get with most colds), … as best as I can tell, the only symptom everyone who has it gets is “ground glass opacities in the lungs”, but that’s not something you can diagnose at home, and that’s ALSO not unique to covid, but can be caused by lots of other respiratory bugs.
A nearby university hospital has begun a study that involves drawing plasma from COVID survivors and going from there. I just e-mailed them with my story, and told them I would be happy to help them out if I qualify. I actually hope I do; I was sick anyway, and if this benefits people later on, I’m in.
I’m wondering if I had in in mid-February. I’d never felt so bad in my life with the symptoms that I had. No diarrhea, and no idea of temperature as I was on a road trip. The road trip makes me suspect. On the airplane to MEX there were people with face-masks. The people at the plant I was visiting were all freaking sick. By my last day there, I couldn’t even stay upright at work.
Buy what really makes me wonder is I’ve experienced a symptom I’ve never experience: my lungs felt like they were burning.