I had some of the worst GI distress of my life in the first week of February. Coming out both ends, retching long after my stomach was empty… It was a horrible experience. It look hours for me to get to sleep. I slept through the morning the next day and felt weak (of course) but okay.
Likely wasn’t COVID, but it’s been a halfway thought ever since I heard that GI issues were a possible symptom.
I had some of the worst GI distress of my life in the first week of February. Coming out both ends, retching long after my stomach was empty… It was a horrible experience. It look hours for me to get to sleep. I slept through the morning the next day and felt weak (of course) but okay.
Likely wasn’t COVID, but it’s been a halfway thought ever since I heard that GI issues were a possible symptom.
I spoke to a friend, a physician, and he said most of the available tests have a 30% false negative rate.
I was still living with my brother earlier this year and we both had lethargy and a bad cough for a week or so. We assumed it was a common cold or a flu that was less severe since we’d been vaccinated, but who knows?
My husband came down with a bad a long-lasting cough in Feb/March, and I got it from him. My cousin and our neighbor, who are both doctors, said it could have been covid-19, despite our not having a temperature, it was a “wet” cough, etc. They said this before the most recent reports about asymptomatic transmission and the prevalence of uncounted cases.
Yep. I’ve had unspecified “colds” that left me with anosmia. The COVID-19 symptoms are so common that it’s really hard to know anything without testing.
I don’t know; I’d like to take an anti-body test when things cool down. I’ve had colds and illnesses on and off in my 48 years, but what hit me mid-February is unlike anything I’d ever experienced. My lungs hurt, fatigue, dry cough, followed by a week of tightness of chest. Then, done.
I’m from the Detroit area and working in the automotive field, during which I’ve lived five years in China and picked up a Chinese wife. Needless to say, I have a lot of indirect links to China both professionally and personally. Professionally speaking, that even includes interacting with a lot of people at WISCO (the ISCO is Iron and Steel Co.,; easy bet on that W).
Heck, back in August, I had symptoms that exactly matched the most common symptoms of COVID-19. That is to say, I had no symptoms at all, which is the same thing that over half of people infected with this coronavirus have.
When the range of symptoms for a disease is so broad that it can frequently include no symptoms at all, any mundane illness can be matched to it. It doesn’t mean anything.
That’s a valid point, but I think what a lot of people are saying is that when they had symptoms, they weren’t symptoms of a mundane illness, though.
Mrs. L knew a man (in Texas) who was about 50 and in good health. He developed COVID-like symptoms and ended up in the hospital. Doctors were baffled and he ended up on a ventilator. That and other measures failed and he ended up in the cemetery. It shocked everyone who knew him. That was end of November.
There’s information that’s been out there—but I hesitate to call it “knowledge” in a sense. When this started, I imagine people who study viruses thought, ‘OK, it’s in the coronavirus family. Most of those behave like this…’ and so they took educated guesses about it. And they’re probably right, often. Isn’t that the medical motto, “When you hear hoof beats look for horses, not zebras?” I think that information is what has circulated as “what we know.” It’s like saying I know you because I know your brother and you’re probably pretty similar.
But there’s a different level of knowledge. You get samples, perform rigorous tests, apply mathematical analyses, etc. That takes time, funding, personnel, access, etc. I’d like to know at this level. I seem to recall among the many articles I’ve read since this started that people were thinking maybe they’d contracted it in January and the conclusion of the article was OH YOU DID NOT! They’ve walked back some other statements, however, like whether or not to wear masks.
So what do we KNOW? The CDC just changed the list of symptoms. So what were we doing, self-diagnosing from the known symptoms, these past weeks? I’ve had intermittent headaches that I’ve been ignoring because they said headaches aren’t a symptom. Now they are. (I don’t think I have it and at no point would I have called in sick if I weren’t already told to stay home, but I could be asymptomatic I guess).
I was sick for a long weekend in February.
Before I had my tonsils & adenoids out, I got colds A LOT. They were always very similar, acute, and upper, upper respiratory. Blocked ears, stuffy nose so stuffy that it was stuffy even when I was standing up, and decongestants didn’t help; sore throat that was very, very sore, and cough that started dry, but quickly became productive, and so persistent, I needed a cough suppressant.
I just don’t get colds anymore. I get bacterial sinus infections sometimes, but they are different. I produce such copious amounts of snot, it looks like I’m turning into a hagfish. I take decongestants & antihistamines to dry up some of the snot. The side effects from them don’t make me feel better, but cutting back on what is coming out of my nose helps. My eyes are puffy, and sometimes even look bruised. They are glassy, and sometimes bloodshot. Sometimes I get a sore throat after enough days of mouth-breathing, but not always. I get headaches. The sinus infections will not go away without an antibiotic. I have tried to wait them out, and they DO NOT go away. They progress to body aches, extreme fatigue, middle ear pain, and conjunctivitis so painful, I need ice packs on my eyes. The time I let one go to see if I could fight it off myself was so disastrous, I needed two antibiotics for a week at once, and then the second one continued another month.
The third thing I get is GI viruses. There is no upper resp. symptoms with these, unless copious vomiting happens to give me a sore throat, and occasionally swelling around my eyes that makes my nose slightly stuffy.
What I had in February had bits of all of those, but was not squarely any of them. I regret that I never took my temperature. Anyway, it started with mild nausea, and a single incident of vomiting, moving down my GI tract, so that later I had diarrhea. I also got a crazy bad headache, and fatigue. I had a stuffy nose, and was very, very tired, and sometime around the same time, I couldn’t taste things very well.
It all could have been attributed to a migraine caused by allergies. I do get nausea with migraines-- but they don’t actually make me throw up. It could have been a headache triggered by vomiting, that I got from food poisoning. Migraines make me tired, and so does not eating well when I have food poisoning. Allergies can make me stuffy, and so can vomiting, albeit, usually not just once incidence of it. A stuffy nose can interfere with my sense of taste.
On the other hand, COVID-19 can cause all that without a lot of special pleading.
The kicker is that in early January, I was in LAX, on a plane from LAX to San Francisco, and then Indianapolis, and also at Legoland, CA. Lots of people from everywhere milling around.
The incubation time is too long, BUT, my son was with me. And he is 13, and not known for handwashing. He could have been the one to catch it, been totally asymptomatic, and then given it to me. In that case the timeline fits just right.
It’s driving me nuts that I don’t know, mainly because if I knew I’d had it, and was immune, I’d apply for a temp position as a nursing aide during the crisis. I have experience, and I’m furloughed from my regular job. It would be perfect if I could be immune, and work at a hospital during the time of greatest need, then when things got a little better, go back to my regular job. It would be one person fewer at genuine risk, and also, one person fewer getting a needed job only to lose it in a few months.
Whaaaaat? What’s the point then?:eek::eek:
That 13.9% positive for antibodies in NY state corresponds to 2.7 million cases. Now we also have an excess in unexplained deaths in Feb and Mar. There’s room for a lot of undetected COVID-19 in the state.
I’m giving this end-of-April (an *eternity *ago, right?) thread a bump, because I’m wondering about new thinking on how COVID spreads.
We now know that some people who had/have COVID spread it (even when asymptomatic) and some people don’t/didn’t. Also, some people get very sick, some sort of sick, and some not at all. We don’t know why.
I was very sick over Christmas 2019. It started with the Sore Throat from Hell for about four days, the worst one I’ve ever had-- like swallowing razor blades. I went to a Doc in the Box and they gave me antibiotics. Then I lost my voice (stood with the choir on Christmas Eve but only mouthed the words). This morphed into a lingering cough for about two months. I’ve read that a lingering cough is one of the aftereffects of COVID. I had had a flu shot in October. My next door neighbor was also quite ill during this period as well as another friend-- I had contact with both. Both of these women tested positive for “flu” and were given Tamiflu. But would a test have detected COVID back then?
Looking back, I’m wondering if anyone wants to revisit the question of, “did I have this and get over it a few months ago?”
I haven’t had a CV test. When you have the test, do they test for antibodies, too, or is that separate?
Why even bring this up now? Oh I don’t know… because I’m neurotic, anxious, and going nuts maybe…
To answer some questions:
Viral tests are specific, if they tested positive for the flu then they had the flu.
They are different tests, and the anti-body tests right now aren’t great.
In terms of the question I posed in the OP, I’d say I’m no closer to being convinced either way. That is, the numbers all suggest that we didn’t have it that early, and the logical part of my brain trusts that, but a small part of me still thinks we did.
The daughter of some of my wife’s parents’ neighbors died in mid-late January in Seattle of pneumonia caused by the “flu”. Never mind that she was a healthy, fit 30-something woman with no bad habits or health issues that any of us were aware of.
Sure sounds like COVID-19, and the timing and location are also awfully coincidental if it really was the flu. But who would have tested anyone? A woman comes in with flu-like symptoms that escalated into pneumonia- what help would doing a flu test have provided?
But the question remains- if it spreads as fast as they say, and is as virulent as they say, why didn’t we see much larger outbreaks much earlier, if it was indeed here as early as November?
The alternative is that maybe in the vast majority of people, it’s not particularly bad- it gets confused with a cold or maybe the flu, and that’s it. And only a tiny minority have symptoms serious enough to warrant hospitalization, and when it did happen, their disease was confused with the flu or some other respiratory virus.
But even at that, antibody testing should show a much higher percentage of positives than we actually see.
Anecdotally, my dad had to go in for unrelated bloodwork, and they did a test for active COVID infection and a separate test for antibodies. He had no active infection, but he had antibodies. Given that my stepmother died of COVID in April, that’s not at all surprising. That my dad, a 79-year-old asthmatic, had absolutely zero COVID symptoms was a very pleasant surprise. But if someone in his circumstances, who was being very careful (he and my stepmother only went for walks around the block and a couple of times to the grocery store, with masks, and he didn’t so much as leave his apartment for a month after he died), was asymptomatic., how many hordes of other asymptomatic people are walking around, infectious, with no idea that they have the virus?
This is why I am not setting foot in a grocery store for the foreseeable future.
And, negative. Not sure of the alpha and beta errors on this antibody test, but for now, I’ll assume I didn’t have it.
I’m inclined to go with your second paragraph.
Even now, yeah it spreads and is virulent, but maybe the vast majority of people either don’t get it or don’t that sick. (The trouble is, the ones who do get REALLY sick.) Even in my city of 1.5 million there are just under 5,000 confirmed cases in the county and there have been *only *(sorry for that) 89 deaths. And the majority of those were elderly and/or in nursing homes.
I agree that if this is true, antibody testing should show a higher percentage in the population, and maybe it will when antibody testing improves.
This is NOT an argument for relaxing precautions BTW. Even if the great majority of people don’t actually die from it, it’s still far from a nothingberder.
So, she was the sort of person who dies from the flu, with flu-like symptoms, in a time and place where the flu was very common, and not at all the sort of person who dies from COVID, in a time and place where COVID was very rare, and you think that… sure sounds like COVID?
Even when the news is reporting that a zebra has escaped from the zoo, hoofbeats are still more likely to be a horse. And when you see the equine in question and it’s uniform in color, it’s even less likely to be a zebra.