> dry eyes

Also no confirmed case here, but I attended a conference and later got an email that one participant tested positive. Since a few days, I also have dry eyes (thought it was because of dry heating air in our apartment first, but it didn't go away for days as it normally does, not even yesterday when we did not had the heating on because of the warm weather), dry cough and I am a little tired. 2 days ago I had an aching sore throat starting in the evening, but it went away during the night and after several very strong cups of fresh hot ginger tea. Also a runny nose. Yesterday I decided to work from home, my wife also couldn't go to work because she also developed a strong dry cough Sunday evening and she decided to better stay at home. Felt a bit tired while working yesterday (and also a bit confused), so my wife suggested I might also have a light fever, but I didn't take any measurement because I really felt fine. She herself had intermittent fever the whole day yesterday, going up to 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 Fahrenheit), so nothing really serious and she felt fine otherwise. Our 12 month old daughter woke us up several times two nights ago with an extremely scary cough, but it didn't seemed to bother her and she continued sleeping. Yesterday morning, though, she looked quite unhappy, was still extremely tired and then basically slept for the whole day, from the morning to the late afternoon. When she woke up, she was completely happy again, no fever, no cough.

I have no idea if we have the virus, but after reading some comments here, I think there is at least a possibility. So far it was really just a nuisance, any cold I had in the last years was much, much worse. Without the media coverage, I would've just shrugged it of and continued to go to work.

I have similar symptoms to yours. I live in Paris and the number of cases here are exploding, but so far for me the mains symptoms are an high temperature, general tiredness and a sore throat/ dry eyes. So far so good, but each day passing I feel a bit more tired. The doctor advised me to take paracetamol every 4 hours, and to stay inside. Also here in France, they are sending SMS to any suspected case with advices and to know if the symptoms are evolving towards the worse case, which is the difficulty to breath.

The dry eyes thing is crazy.

I got Lasik about two years ago and had a period of dry eyes afterwards, which abated in time. I got them again about a week ago. I also got an intermittent fever and a dry cough. The fever wasn't severe and only hit me for a short period over several days. The cough, which is still present, is like a smoker's cough and is accompanied by a feeling of reduced lung capacity.

Dry cough and fever are the most common symptoms of Covid. Given that you display both, staying at home is definitely the correct behavior. Also get on the phone with your GP or the respective coronavirus hotline for your country to inquire about the next steps.

Kind of sounds like allergies?

Similarly, I'm not a confirmed case but I've been isolation since Friday just out of general precaution, and I developed a mild chest tightness while here. I was sure it wasn't covid because I didn't have a fever, but just a few hours ago I checked again and I have a borderline one (99.4). Then my girlfriend got an email that someone tested positive from the same floor in her office.

I don't qualify for a test and my doctor said don't bother coming in with my current symptoms and risk profile. Still waiting to hear back about whether my girlfriend qualifies, who has a closer connection to a case and an underlying health condition.

Last weekend we were very nearly at a small conference. We had zero symptoms. Even now I'm not sure if I have covid, a cold, or if I'm just stressing myself into seeing something that isn't there.

I would be a lot more stressed if I had gone to that conference, and given people there whatever it is I have.

Same here, persistent mild chest pressure. My girlfriend as well as myself are experiencing it. But it's so subtle that you start to question it at times. But especially when lying in bed it becomes quite annoying or frightening if I think too much about it.

The 'it feels worse when lying in bed' is something I can really identify with

Hey, here with you. I have chest tightness (and sometimes a stabby pain) and it feels like I cannot breathe as well. Going on for almost two weeks now - no other symptoms at all.

I called in with a physician and they said likely not covid, just muscular stuff. I also have allergies and thing begin to bloom...

So I am confused and worried, lots of anxiety. But it could just be allergies or something muscular from workout (had that before).

That sounds like anxiety to me. I used to get that in my early 20s with those exact symptoms. That was before I learn to recognize my anxiety. Breathing tools were the best solution, at different times I've needed anti-anxiety medication.

Chest tightness and panicked breathing, followed by heart palpitations with no other primary symptoms (fever, cough, etc).

This is a very stressful time, especially for high-information consumers. I wouldn't be surprised if there are thousands of people right now mistaking anxiety for COVID symptoms. Over analyzing your health can lead to some crazy self-driven outcomes too.

I'm also not 100% convinced that it isn't something psychosomatic. The whole situation is very tense and that reflects physically. The fact that even in Germany testing isn't an option doesn't help. I stay mostly home and and it seems that the situation is improving. I hope you'll also soon feel better!

Thank you, today it seemed better until afternoon... now its back to tight chest and all. It might very well be psychosomatic but I dont dare to go out to a physician these days.

Same boat--annoying overlap that anxiety causes the same symptom. Luckily I've always worked from home, so have been pretty well isolated.

I am inclined to believe I am in the same boat. I have had a somewhat sore throat in the morning. I am producing a slight amount of phlegm with a light cough. I don't have a thermometer and they're unreasonably expensive locally/amazon. My chest feels fairly tight.

I don't know if it's allergies or what, but every one on my office floor is coughing. We're all fairly young so I can't help but believe they're all also infected and just rolling along.

Same here in London over a month ago. Though my wife and I did develop mild respiratory problems.

I've been arguing for days that the death rates are complete fantasy. People still only using tested cases / deaths when in fact no one is being tested.

In South Korea, as of the weekend only 248,000 people out of a population of 50,000,000, with 8,086 +ve cases and 72 deaths. Without statistical extrapolation that's a <1% death rate. Real rate a fraction again of that. Hospitalisation rate is high because an abundance of caution due to the publicity around this.

Regarding your fear about primary carriers, the advice in the UK is not to visit vulnerable groups. If you are asymptomatic you are also less likely to cough etc and died the disease.

In my office culture anyone who is sick is told to go home and made to feel unwelcome (in a friendly way) Had been this way for decades. We know not to visit each other.

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases

I came to similar conclusion just looking at the openly available numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

If you compare the number of serious cases to the number of total cases for different countries you'll get a 10x difference. Norway tests more thoroughly then the other countries, so it has a huge number of active cases. But from those only ~2% serious. There may be different reasons for such a discrepancy but I tend to agree with your conclusion that we have a lot of asymptomatic cases around, higher then estimated R0 and lower then estimated fatality.

Sincerely curious, how do you square this with the CFR in Italy at this time? That the initial impact to primarily elderly people and a low count of cases compared to a much larger undiagnosed quantity (still mostly undiagnosed cases) are creating a high death rate statistic? Or do you think some other factors are at work there?

I made a simple site to graph the daily increase figures. It only shows infections and deaths but from that you can see very different ratios for different countries.

(http://coronanalytics.com if you’re interested.)

You might try sorting the countries in your select input. They appear to be in some random order and I almost gave up looking for the country I was interested in.

This is a good shout. I’m just using them in the order the John Hopkins institute put them. A sort would be useful!

Came back from the link to leave the same comment. It's impossible to use that selector.

do you respect the time delay when calculating Case Fatality Rate?

https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203

I’m just using the data straight from the John Hopkins institute.

https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

Mean incubation period is 5.6 days (range 1-14). So while possible, it’s highly unlikely you got it 1 day after infection.

"Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions.

It's possible I picked it up elsewhere, and less likely that I have something else with these unique symptoms (I've never a had fever without nasal congestion or gastrointestinal symptoms before). However, I think it makes sense I would be at the lower incubation period range due to the high level of contact with said suspect and the fact that I'm an otherwise healthy young adult, which as I understand it can lead to the immune system reacting faster.

> "Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions.

Just wanted to boost this. With a range of 1–14 days, it's possible for close to 50% of infections to only incubate for ~1 day, and still have a mean of 5.6 days for incubation. Without knowledge of the distribution, the mean means nothing.

Just realized I understated this. It's actually possible for 64.6% of infections to only incubate for 1 day and get a mean of 5.6 days, if the other 35.4% of infections incubate for 14 days (i.e. an extremely bimodal distribution at 1 and 14 days).

“We estimated that fewer than 2.5% of infected persons will show symptoms within 2.2 days (CI, 1.8 to 2.9 days) of exposure, and symptom onset will occur within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) for 97.5% of infected persons.”

From https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period...

Note that I am not an M.D. But, consider getting a pulse oximeter. You can use it to assess your respiratory function (more) objectively. Anxiety and panic attacks can impact your oxygen saturation, but unlikely to do so to dangerous levels.

Again, I'm not an MD. Maybe someone from the field of medicine can add their thoughts here.

Your comment made me want to get an Oximeter so i hopped on amazon right now.

These were my results: https://i.imgur.com/LIta2jR.png

One of these things just doesn't belong!!!

LOL, thanks a lot for sharing! Really made my day here, and I needed that :)

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases. This is good in that it means the death rate is also off by that factor, but bad in that there will not be enough fear/incentive for the primary carriers (young adults) to adhere to adequate social distancing.

If the death rate is off by 10x-50x, isn't this approaching the death rate of seasonal influenza, in which case we didn't actually need to adhere to social distancing in the first place?

I expect an interesting side effect of all this is a reassessment of our tolerance for the "usual" influenza death rate. It's shockingly high. Could we save thousands of lives a year by people stopping going to work when they're sick, not going to grocery store when they're sick, etc?

I think that too. Basically the long long history of people of mostly old people checking out due to flu has normalized something terrible. As many people dying of flu as auto accidents.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

Just people washing their hands and not working when sick would probably help a lot with the seasonal flu. But maybe another idea would be to get more people to use the flu vaccine every year.

That doesn't add up, if it wasn't worse than seasonal influenza, then Italys hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed.

a regular flu epidemic does between 10k to 20k over a span of two months in france alone. that's more than the total number of casualties of the covid-19 so far.My feeling so far is the problem is that most covid-19 emergencies can actually be cured if you've got a breathing machine, which requires special equipment not available at the moment.

I'd say the virus isn't more dangerous than the flu, it's just requiring a very specific set of equipment which we didn't need as much previously.

of course that will all depend on what the number evolves to over time.

However, now hospitals have to contend with both the flu AND COVID-19

Seasonal flu already puts quite a strain on most hospital systems every year. If the rate of severe flu infection were doubled, I think a lot of health care systems would be pushed to the limit. And Covid-19 is worse than the flu, if not in terms of severity (although that is up for debate), it is in terms of contagiousness, as there is no one in the population with resistance from prior exposure, no vaccines, etc.

So it is plausible that Italy (and other countries) problems are a result of a double whammy of flu and Covid19 as it is due to the severity of Covid19 itself.

Italy did everything wrong.

They basically turned hospitals into covid19 infection parties.

Italys transmission rate is exactly the same exponential curve as everywhere else, chinas hospitals were overwhelmed, spanish hospitals are being overwhelmed, and its currently starting in the netherlands and germany.

All year round is basically influenza infection party everywhere yet it doesn't overwhelm our medical systems.

do you have sources for that ? i'm extremely interested in understanding why italy seems to be suffering that much compared to other countries. If it's just a matter of being the first, or if it's also something specific to them.

As a side note - and JFYI - Italy's situation is very nuanced, as you can see on this map (divided by region):

http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

In the North (and particularly in Lombardy) the situation is dramatic, in the center and in the south it is not (yet) that bad.

Basically the lock-down (started on national level on the 10 th of March) seemingly - and for the moment - managed to work to reduce the spread of the infection in other regions.

The previous lock-down (limited to some cities/provinces of the north) was only a couple days before and evidently too late to be effective.

Maybe, maybe not. Part of what makes the influenza death rate what it is is that those cases are spread over several months and hospitals can support the patients who recover. If all the influenza cases came to a head over a 3 week period, death rates would be much higher.

The disease also appears to spread much faster than the flu. So even if the death rate is comparable, the infection rate is likely to be far higher.

let's say there were 320,000 people without symptoms in China, which seems unlikely, that would make the total cases approximately 400000, and if we just looked at the fatalities so far out of that it would be a fatality rate of 0.8% iirc the common flu is 0.1% fatality, so if this only had 0.8% but affects 40-70% of the world (which seems to me like it would be at the 70% end if there are lots of asymptomatic people)

so 40% of 7 billion and then 0.8% of that is 22,400,000 - my math is probably off here.

> 320,000 people without symptoms in China

Wuhan (the city, not even the entire province of Hubei) has 11 million people. Given what we know now about how virulently and covertly COVID-19 spreads and how (relatively late) Wuhan went into lockdown, how do you feel about that number?

if 50% to 75% of cases are asymptomatic that means 25% to 50% are symptomatic.

I'm not taking the exact 75% number here in the following - but close, and I will do some hasty approximations.

Current total cases (maybe off by some hours) is 80,894.

80894 is 20.2% of 400000.

400000 - 80000 = 320000.

So yes, given the article's premises 320000 is pretty much on the optimistic side for humanity.

on edit: but once again my math is probably off somewhere so correct it if you see some glaring error in my reasoning. Also note these numbers are for China, of course.

you're assuming everyone is capable of being infected to detectable levels.

no that is exactly what I am not doing, hence my starting off my explanation with:

"if 50% to 75% of cases are asymptomatic that means 25% to 50% are symptomatic."

then I go ahead and choose a number (400000) which is on the optimistic end of this range - 80894 is 20.2% of 400000 - I believe that is quite clear, if 80894 is 20.2% of 400000 and 80894 is the amount of total cases counted in China (no longer the case) then I am assuming 79.8% people asymptomatic that have not been counted! (although of course I did some simplifying of things around so my percentages and numbers are not exact, but I think given the linked article slightly under 320000 people being asymptomatic and 80894 being symptomatic is a very optimistic take)

what number do you want to assume is not counted? millions? I assume that from your earlier post but that does not follow from the 50% to 75% cases are asymptomatic.

Obviously if 50% to 75% are asymptomatic and you had 1 million people infected all together (symptomatic and asymptomatic) that would mean you needed to have at least 250000 (25% of a million) to 500000 (50% of a million) people symptomatic. But we don't have those numbers symptomatic, we have slightly under 81000.

This is likely because our immume system is not familliar with this virus yet.

This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months', opening the door to multiple infections per year per person.

> This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months',

There is no evidence either way. Even if it is transient it will be enough for it to die down

There's some very strong indicators that immunity will be ephemeral.

It's possible the R naught will drop below the currently assessed 2.2 over time, but there's no evidence for that -- and if both these things stay as expected, it won't be transient enough to 'die down' naturally.

Unfortunately until we get an antigen test, we will not know for sure. But there is no reason to believe at this point that it isn't anything other than a standard immune response.

It would extremely rare that it wasn't

There's no indication how long the immunity is expected to last. It's just as likely that immunity, even if temporary, can last for a year or more, as is the case with the flu or some other viruses.

On HN this morning -- news that someone in Japan is already on their second infection of this virus.

So there's our first data point.

This is an important question and it needs to be answered.

There needs to be systematic sampling of the whole population so the number of infected can be correctly measured and the policies should be based on that.

This is also what WHO is saying.

So far the actual problem seems to be the hospitalization rate, not the death rate in ideal conditions. Most countries just don't have the spare capacity to handle COVID in addition to the normal workload.

One factor in this is that a good portion of the at-risk population is vaccinating against the flu, greatly reducing the overall impact.

Exactly the same.

Considering that antimalarial drugs have positive impact against COVID-19, do you happen to be a carrier of thalassaemia?

Those with the trait of thalassaemia happen to have a better chance not contracting malaria, hence the prevelance around the Mediterranean.

What are you saying, that thalassaemia is protective against COVID?

Thalassaemia protects against malaria because blood cells (the home of the parasite during a phase of its lifecycle) are destroyed up to 3-4x faster than in non-thalassaemia traits (where they last on average for 120 days).

Chloroquine seems to work by interfering with cellular binding and entry of SARS-CoV-2 on the ACE2 receptor (amongst other mechanisms)

This is why only people with training or understanding should speak about medical matters, there is enough rubbish out there (particularly at the moment) without you adding to the noise

(0) https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/#chloroquine