Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' virus fragments: experts

Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by egfx on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:55PM (#23023426)

My story is that at the end of October I flew from SFO and on the way home I felt sick to my stomach (probably food poisoning), but about 5 weeks later in December I was having some pretty severe breathing issues, like it was cut in half and no other symptoms I could identify. It was attributed to anxiety by my doctor and a few days later I felt okay. Then at the beginning of the year in January it hit again and has been hitting me on a monthly cycle with diminished severity. In fact I’m feeling it again today after feeling totally fine for weeks. I don’t know if its Covid because I was never tested for the disease or the antibodies but it was And is a strange feeling unlike anything I’ve felt. Like wearing an extremely tight turtleneck. I wonder after reading these accounts if this disease is a chronic illness that lives in your circulatory system. Is there anything known about this?

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by jychang on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @07:03PM (#23025604)

Yeah, that's just the flu or some other disease. It's a bad flu year.

If it was actually covid-19 community spreading in December, then we wouldn't be talking about a few thousand deaths now in April, we'd be talking about millions. The exponential curves don't match up.

Whatever you had, it wasn't covid-19.

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by throwaway374810 on Thursday April 30, 2020 @06:48AM (#23029466)

> If it was actually covid-19 community spreading in December, then we wouldn't be talking about a few thousand deaths now in April, we'd be talking about millions.

That's assuming the death rate is as high as it is estimated from known cases. If the actual death rate is a magnitude smaller due to huge amounts of undocumented cases, then the curve is wrong.

Going by some of the antibody tests performed, this seems to be the case, but the antibody tests might be erroneous as well.

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by Lewton on Thursday April 30, 2020 @07:01AM (#23029562)

There's a strict lower bound of around 0.5% on how mild the IFR can be looking at NYC and Italy

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.18.20070912v...

There's absolutely no way that it's been running rampant since december

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by Drdrdrq on Thursday April 30, 2020 @01:48PM (#23033727)

Hell no. That estimate comes with many assumptions, so unless you are willing to list them all, it is better to just provide the link. And it is still just one study, waiting to be proven / disproven. Take it easy and use common sense.

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Re:Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' vi... by AaronFriel on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @06:02PM (#23024959)

Sounds like we had a similar respiratory disease. I also flew through SFO, like many millions of others, in December. I fell ill over the holidays, and then again in January. I also rarely fall ill, and hadn't had a cold or even severe allergies for several years.

My primary symptom was respiratory, I could go up a single flight of stairs and feel short of breath, like someone was standing on my throat and lungs.

I saw my doctor a few times about it, but neither my partner, nor my family, nor my co-workers fell ill. The phylogeny that I've seen published about SARS-CoV-2 definitively rules out that I had it. Likewise, if I did I'd expect that based on how virulent covid-19 is, I'd expect someone else I know or one of my grandparents to have caught it.

I've seen similar reports of a respiratory illness on Twitter and I think it comes down to a uniquely bad flu season and perhaps some other bug going around which hits the respiratory system.

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