I spoke to my physician, who performed a differential diagnosis over the phone. I eliminated environmental considerations, and did a quick "patient history" with him and my contacts, which eliminated other possibilities.

The list of diseases which could explain my symptoms is extremely short. The only one which crosses all the boxes is coronavirus.

My test should be coming back today or tomorrow.

And even if it weren't Corona, you still experienced shitty symptoms and realized how much even "mild" Corona can suck.

Two of my friends have it right now and they basically got a really nasty cold, not too bad. Others die.

One experience doesn't invalidate the other.

Indeed, I know two people that went to the hospital because they thought it was covid, but in both cases it was pulmonary embolism, which has very similar symptoms. I'm not even close to a medical expert, but I wouldn't be surprised that because of less physical movement due to being home more, embolisms are more common.

And if you only use raw disease incidence[0] as your prior, you're approximately just as likely (-ish?) to have pulmonary embolism. This obviously does not include other very important priors, like age, exact symptom list or incidence of SARS-CoV-2 in your area right now.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3718593/

Good fortune and wealth comes to people who read the whole post before reaching for the reply button.

So what happened to you then?

When one is standing in a herd of horses and one is kicked in the head by a hoof, one reasonably concludes that a horse, not a zebra, kicked someone.

Well... there's a lot of hoofed animals out there.

- 3 million annual cases of bronchitis in the US with practically identical symptoms.

- 45 million annual cases of the flu in the US and yeah, some people get those symptoms too.

- Common cold, pneumonia, whooping cough, strep, mono.

There's a whole host of upper respiratory tract infections [1] that can and frequently do present this way. We've been getting these exact symptoms practically forever.

Given the sensitivity of the topic right now the least we can do is get data before adding to the discourse. It's hard to take panic back. Given you can get a PCR test with same-day results, it would be nice if OP could wait 24 hours to confirm :)

I got super sick back in February, basically the same exact symptoms OP posted, and a cough that lasted 6 weeks. Took an antibody test a few months later. I tested negative.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532961/

Your priors should be remarkably different now vs. last February. At the end of February the U.S. had 60 active reported COVID cases. Assume a 10:1 underreporting and that's about 600 total cases, then assume about 100 million cold + flu cases at any given time in the winter and there's about 200,000:1 odds that a given respiratory illness was actually COVID.

Now there are 4.1 million active COVID cases in the U.S. Assume a 5:1 underreporting (we're better at testing, but still seeing close to 50% test positivity rates in the Midwest, worse than NYC at the peak) and that's 20 million active cases. Meanwhile flu cases have dropped by ~90% [1], so if we assume that holds true for colds as well, estimate about 10 million active cases of cold & flu in the U.S. A random respiratory illness with no further differentials then has a 2:1 chance of being COVID.

Obviously things like location, differential diagnosis, etc. will change those odds. A random respiratory illness in the Bay Area (where COVID numbers are low and we just had a bunch of wildfires) is most likely to be allergies or smoke inhalation, while if you had a random respiratory illness in NYC in April there was a decent chance it was COVID. Given the OP's differential diagnosis though (rash and shortness of breath are way more common in COVID than bronchitis or flu), it's not unreasonable to conclude he has COVID.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm

What a terrible analogy, given the extremely varied symptoms of covid.

Be kind, don't be snarky, assume good faith.

Then you should probably refrain from posting here as it is a core value of hackernews culture.

It's an explicit rule on this site, so please follow it.

Another rule you have violated is "don't be snarky"

For a list of rules, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You can come over to my apartment and breathe in the air around me, I'm sure we'd all figure out very soon.

In any case, your comment is not in the spirit of this website and does not contribute to the discussion.

Yeah, I stopped reading after that. How is this a top post on an HN thread?

So many mysteries in life are self-imposed.

You're so uncurious that you dismissed the entire post as soon as you stumbled upon something that led to a question?