No symptoms at that point. 2 days later, I started feeling more tired than usual. The next day I had a mild fever and was sweating more than usual when exercising. This lasted 3 days, after which I only felt the fatigue for another 5 days.
No lasting effects that I can name.
I'm 31, male.
I had a cold around 5th-10th of February. I take levothyroxine every day, multivitamin everyday, Gabapentin every day, Vitamin C 500mg twice a week. Light exercise everyday, a more thorough workout twice a week. I drink alcohol and smoke tobacco regularly, and everyday between 24th of February - 15th of March.
I mention all that because some research said the cold and CV viruses are competitive, plus having the immune system "battle ready" after a simple cold could've helped. Levothyroxine increases metabolism, vitamins and exercise probably help. Smoking has been linked to lesser symptoms, too. I wonder what the effects would've been without all that.
Anxiety over Covid (I scared myself reading reports on Reddit) and losing my job (unrelated, but bad timing) was by far a bigger problem than the virus itself.
Which is not to say that others do not have lingering symptoms -- but if we're going to emphasize scary anecdotes, it seems like we should spend proportional time reporting the vastly larger number of anecdotes that are not scary, as well?
I haven't backed up my personal data in years and nothing nasty has happened, despite all those catastrophic data-loss stories you read online. I'm all for proportional reporting time, but strangely, no one reports on stories like mine - it's mostly in the vein of "Company shutters after accidental db deletion". I wonder why.
There's a reason we pay attention to tail risks, where the low-probability negative consequences are far worse than the high-probability costs of averting them. The vast majority of people are not going to die in car crashes, or of SIDS, or of COVID, or from untreated kidney infections. They are lucky. But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.
No, by definition, they're the norm. They're not lucky, they're just normal. The expected outcome. The people who encounter the tail risks are unlucky.
Not too long ago, a part of a jet fell off over suburban Denver. I would be dismayed if someone -- engineers and investigators -- didn't obsess over this event. But if my brother wants to know if it's safe to get on an airplane, or live in suburban Denver, then my answer is not going to change.
I would also discourage anyone else from reading HN posts with obscure technical documents from Boeing and the FAA, and speculating about what it means for aviation in general. Or reading other peoples' posts on these topics, and sharing anecdotes about how "someone they knew" died in some ghastly aviation accident. And so on.
It is in our nature to exaggerate the importance of rare events. They are still rare.
> But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.
How did masks get swirled up into this? I swear...people will find any way to turn these things into a political debate. Can we agree that by this point, the debate about masks is fully baked, and no amount of discussion of Covid outcomes is going to change someone's mind?
You can find anecdotes on the internet to support literally any fear that you care to indulge. The point is, most of the time, these fears are not worth indulging, and what you read on the internet exaggerates the actual threat.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying I quite disagree with you that death is so much worse than anything else. Why is death so bad? It's the only certainty you actually have in life. There's an average age of death but you're quite unlikely to die at that specific one. It's gonna come either expectedly (like a cancer diagnosis giving you X months to live) or unexpectedly (an accident). Just accept it and stop trying to fight it by trying to minimize the risk since it'll happen anyways. Instead think about whether there are things you want to prepare for those left behind when you do go. And then stop worrying and enjoy the ride while it lasts. It's just a dice roll anyways, try to have fun! Don't hold back. Challenge yourself, face your fears, jump into the unknown. Don't try to follow the recipe for a perfect harm-free life to the book. That sounds like an insanely boring life to me but I suppose YMMV.
I still hear people worrying about safety despite the fact that half the UK, a large part of the US and countless others have been jabbed. That's after the original trials. I can understand some people's reluctance wrt vaccination. Many countries have had examples of problematic vacc campaigns. In the UK the MMR jab had a major set back due to Andrew Wakefield's false article in the Lancet [1].
From what I gather the thrombosis risk from the Oxford/Astrazeneca jab is somewhat swamped by error bars and open to interpretation. However the risk from the pandemic is very real and demonstrably so. I had my jab last Tues and it was O/AZ but I wont ask anyone to extrapolate much from that!
It also talks about how poorer people, and those from non-white backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have worse outcomes.
Just because you don't see it happening in your circles, doesn't mean it's not happening in other ones.
The authors write in the BMJ: “The increase in risk was not confined to the elderly and was not uniform across ethnicities."
Having an office of national statistics does not mean that this particular paper is being reported correctly by the mass media, it doesn't mean that the paper itself supports the discussion of "long covid" amongst otherwise healthy people, and it certainly doesn't mean that other people on this thread reporting personal stories are representative of the actual risk. That last bit is what I'm emphasizing here. Literally any scary anecdote is amplified, and the (many more) pedestrian anecdotes go undiscussed.
As other comments on this page have noted, there are a number of legitimate criticisms of this paper that should be considered carefully, and even if you don't agree with those, the paper is self-admittedly discussing a predominantly elderly, sick population who were hospitalized for the virus. It doesn't generalize to discussion of anecdotes of "long covid" from much healthier people.
> It also talks about how poorer people, and those from non-white backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have worse outcomes. Just because you don't see it happening in your circles, doesn't mean it's not happening in other ones.
You're making assumptions.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
To me, they seem to be trying to make it as accessible and clear as possible with most news articles taking the salient points directly from the ONS's own summary.
As you can see from figure 2, their data is not focused on old people as you erroneously claim, it does seem to show that more deprived = more symptoms, and that non-white are more likely to have symptoms.
The hard part is unless you have diabetes or similar, it seems random to me. And I don’t see good accounting of long term symptoms.
The political bullshit is such that we won’t really know what’s up for a few years.
But the weird long-COVID cases are problematic - they're real, they affect a certain slice of the demographics, and can be pretty serious and long-term.
They are definitely real, and can be serious and long term, but they likely aren't novel; I suspect ME/CFS, "long lyme" and a variety of other conditions often dismissed as psychosomatic by practitioners who can't find a test for them - are post viral/post infectious syndromes, and they will be joined by "long covid".
Perhaps some good will come of this - those "long sequelae" diseases will get more and proper attention.
But none of the data I've seen so far about "long covid" puts it out of line with what we've known about post-viral sequalae for ages.
Most people (I read it's around 86%) having such mild symptoms that they don't even realize it's Covid must've contributed a lot to its rapid spread.
The more vulnerable people get the same virus and suffer much more. Perhaps vulnerable people should've been subjected to stricter lockdown measures, not sure what else could help reduce the deaths.
I am interested in reading about others' experiences, it's just that everything I could find (mostly on Reddit) depicted a much worse picture.
And yet statistics say that the vast majority of people have it easy like me.
I mentioned I would love a database like Erowid, with input from everyone who has had a confirmed infection. I'd read through all of it and make my own conclusions.
I was told to self quarantine and call an ambulance if I felt worse. The hospitals here are overwhelmed just like many other cities/countries.
A small minority of people having serious difficulties with the virus can turn into a large medical issue when the denominator is 1/3 to 1/2 of the country getting infected.
You may already be aware of this but there's an organ there called the thymus which is a core part of the immune system (especially in younger people)
Seems to be a symptom with relatively little discussion even in medical journals but can confirm I also had it for months after a relatively mild case, tending to reemerge due to tiredness or exercise.
The thymus (the favourite organ of a friend of mine) is quite unusual, being replaced by regular boring fatty tissue after childhood.
Not a doctor. Could be wrong. Just sound like anxiety symptoms from my experience.
I've had similar symptoms, and more, for the past 8 months. Heart palpitations, feeling of heaviness in the chest, strange exhaustion... I admit this does sound like anxiety. However, after suffering from anxiety for two decades, I've learned what my anxiety feels like. This is different. It's like comparing grits and runny oatmeal--I can understand why many descriptions are insufficient to distinguish between them, and even how one might be able to masquerade as the other, but having had both, it's clear they are not the same.
So maybe I'm wrong and I haven't been experiencing anxiety when I have these symptoms. I agree it's a bit different than having a panic attack in my experience.
I still haven’t gotten fully back on my feet.
But temporary -- and not all that long compared to the hell we've all had to endure for more than a year now -- except in extremely rare cases. Evidence to the contrary is welcome, after more than a year there should be some.
You understand the burden of proof is on the person who's making a claim, not on people who disagree with the claim?
I've too suffered being stuck at home for more than a year, but in my book this is still better than me or somebody else getting sick with god-only-knows what long term complications, which we don't have data for one way or another, and won't for some time still.
> which we don't have data for one way or another, and won't for some time still.
Exactly. There is no evidence for "long Covid" as a frequent phenomenon. The pandemic has been going on for 15 months. Yet those who believe in long Covid still only provide evidence that people aren't always fully recovered after timespans like 3 months.
If Covid frequently caused permanent damage, there would be a lot of people who were infected, say, a year ago, who haven't recovered and show no sign of doing so (their condition has plateaued). There would be studies showing that, there isn't exactly a shortage of scientists researching the topic. And, obviously, people would provide that evidence as it would support their point better. Yet they don't.
Interesting idea, but false in this case unless you are arguing that lockdowns are and will be, in perpetuity, the status quo.
> this is still better than me or somebody else getting sick with god-only-knows what long term complications, which we don't have data for one way or another
Are you arguing your presence in society is outweighed by the mere possibility of you having a negative effect on it?
I am not arguing either way, what I am saying is shouting "here's what I think, prove me wrong" is not how it works. "Here's what I think, and here is the evidence" is how it works.
Lack of data can't support any claim. If we don't have good data on whether lockdowns are effective, it doesn't mean they aren't. It means we don't know. In which case we do a risk analysis, taking our uncertainty and potential benefits/drawbacks into account.
> Are you arguing your presence in society is outweighed by the mere possibility of you having a negative effect on it?
I don't consider myself absent from society. I am talking to you now, am I not? And yes, I consider my temporary suffering to be outweighed by potentially permanent suffering of myself or someone else.
Speak for yourself!
My life was largely unchanged by covid beyond wearing a facial covering in public which I actually prefer. What a joy to not only walk into banks dressed like a bandit without getting arrested, but to be asked to do it and thanked for cooperating!
This certainly hasn't been any sort of hell for me, but catching covid let alone "long covid" seems likely to be quite awful and potentially life-changing for anyone.
Living in US, NJ FWIW
So what you are saying is, despite "the experts" saying exactly the opposite... by slowing the spread of covid we'd somehow be out of this sooner?
Do you guys realize how insane this logic sounds? The goal of these lockdowns was to intentionally slow down the spread. Not stop or eradicate covid. Harder lockdowns mean this goes on much longer.
How can people genuinely think otherwise? It's like basic math.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-tragedy-of-the-post-...
Search for the term "covid long haulers" to get more information.
> Search for the term "covid long haulers" to get more information.
No. https://thelogicofscience.com/2016/09/27/dont-tell-people-to...
There is a minimum number of deaths that we should accept as a society just like we accept other causes of death.