Long COVID should not be ignored.

As for lung capacity: I used to play saxophone pretty fanatically and I think that is one of the reasons I got through this with a relatively low amount of damage.

Funnily enough, I used to play the flute and sing before contracting COVID. With my lung capacity halved, my ability is nowhere near what it used to be. Long COVID has taken all my hobbies away from me: running, singing, hip-hop dancing. If anyone knows of any support groups relating to Long COVID, please let me know.

For those not familiar with the term: You position yourself with your head a foot lower than your hips (and your back straight). You hold that for 15 minutes or so. You let gravity pull the junk out of your lungs down to where you can cough it out. Warning: It's not fun. First, your head feels like it's going to explode from the lung pressure. Second, when a chunk comes out, oxygen starts hitting an area of your lungs for the first time in maybe months. That hurts. (Or so my daughter says. She had to do this.)

"Postural drainage is considered safe and effective, but may cause some side effects. The procedure is discontinued if the patient complains of headache, discomfort, dizziness, palpitations,[3] fatigue, or dyspnea. Patients may be dyspnic after the various manuovers, since the head-down position increases the work of breathing, reduces tidal volume, and decreases functional residual capacity (FRC).[citation needed]"

http://survivorcorps.com

The particular FB group I'm in is called (creatively enough) "Long Covid Support Group", but a search there reveals there are many more.

My email is in my profile if you want to connect further over this. I consider myself mostly healed by this point (infected March 2020) and can share my vitamin regime (its efficacy is anecdotal, my sample size is 2) but I still have lingering health issues over a year later.

You may want to look into the Airofit Pro: https://www.airofit.com/

Yes, this is exactly what she describes. The closest she could get to describing it was "cigarettes" when I pressed her, but she really insisted should couldn't even characterize it.

Sometimes I wonder how much our sense of smell is connected to the gut microbiome.

I have had a whole bunch of scans and everything is normal. I will be having an endoscopy next week to hopefully get to the bottom of it. I am 'hoping' it is something simple and obvious that they can treat. So far everything ends up being "well it's not $insertMedicalCondition so let's check for $insertSomeOtherMedicalCondition" :(

I have dysautonomia, which I had long before (probably) getting COVID-19. I have a rare form of dysautonomia. But, dysautonomia does happen, relatively frequently, as post-viral cases.

The good news is that post-viral dysautonomia has high potential for improving and even (realistically) going away. Rest will be the best treatment.

Check my profile if you want to email me or want help.

Turned out to be an underlying autoimmune disorder (Sjogrens) and a clotting disorder “factor 5 Leiden”

The exposure triggered both from mild barely noticeable problems to I was completely disabled.

Took years to figure out it out.

When I got covid it was basically the same event again. Took months for body to calm down again.

I have autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy (autoimmune dysautonomia), which is believed to have caused my type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent). It is also believed to have caused other endocrine problems and other neurological problems (I have another immune-mediated neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system). Anyways, autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy is very rare, and I have the antibodies (about half of people do not), so I am tremendously lucky.

Anyways, I would be interested in chatting with you. If you want to do so, my email is in my profile information. I am very resourceful and I have tips.

What's been particularly frustrating with long covid is because it's so new, I've had to have awkward pushy conversations with doctors to get me treatment I deserve. You can't get high off beta blockers, which helps assuage my feelings of being an addict engaging in drug seeking behavior, simply trying to get my heart rate under control, but the medical industry has largely failed patients here. The only reprieve is that enough healthcare professionals also got sick, so the fact that there's nothing that shows up on scans of my heart isn't taken as fact that there's nothing wrong with it.

I had never heard of it nor know anyone on it before but apparently it is good. Too early for me to say if it is personally. I want to avoid any kind of addictive medication if possible.

I tested negative for covid antibodies. I'm not sure about all the data on "post covid 19 syndrome" but I check a lot of boxes for it but didn't test positive. My wife is in a similar block. Just tossing some anecdata out there.

The greatest concentrator of such info on the whole internet, is, as far as I can tell, https://twitter.com/grimhood - follow him and get a feel for the info he's spreading, he has very valuable information on all sorts of healing protocols.

Lastly, one that will no doubt be most controversial, but also has promising anecdotes: Ivermectin.

[edit] here come the downvotes, for those that do, note that downvotes, at least on HN, are not meant to express disagreement, they are meant for content that is objectionable for other reasons.

I have used said supplements before. In fact, I have a close friend who is very enamored with supplements and has about 50 different pill bottles in his medicine drawer.

Out of curiosity, I once spent two weeks taking about 25 pills a day at his recommendation, and I'm afraid they did not do very much for me — at least that I could noticeably discern.

The only supplement/herbal medicine I've had success with is St. Johns Wort, but I've been strongly discouraged from using it by a psychiatrist who emphatically emphasized that an SSRI is a much safer and more controllable way to achieve the same effects if need be.

Magnesium deficiency is relatively common, though I wonder if that isn't more of a dietary issue.

There are absolutely scammers selling trash (there's someone selling stem cell injections as a cure) and fuck them. But don't ignore the very real problems that patients are experiencing, and that they're helped by simple remedies that aren't yet proven by science. Science will catch up, but people are suffering dying in the meanwhile.

Yep. From Wikipedia[1]:

> On average, lead levels in women taking St. John's wort are elevated about 20%.

It's also a relatively dirty drug, with effects on typical monoamine and GABA reuptake, MAO-A and MAO-B inhibition and is an inhibitor or inducer at pretty much every relevant enzyme that breaks down common medications.

I wouldn't want to become dependent on something like that because the withdrawal syndrome could be pretty nasty compared to something relatively more selective and understood like an SSRI.

Even switching from SJW to something else might be tricky because of the enzyme induction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypericum_perforatum#Antidepre...

For illustration, just go on pubmed and search for "nigella sativa" (black seed oil).

I'm speaking from personal experience here. I suffer from a mild case of Erythromelalgia. During typing my fingers and hands would get red and feel warm. My case is most likely secondary caused by some nerve damage from a medication I took. There is a doctor who had severe case of it and has done some research on using magnesium/ala and it made his condition 95% better and he was able to return back to work. I have been following his protocol for about a month now, and it has made an incredible difference.

Anyone who is suffering from an annoying illness, that is not aggressive and require immediate treatment, should try research possible supplements and diets. Clean/healthy diet is always good.

This is factually wrong. Search for posts by dang frequently explaining traditions and norms in this forum, including the downvote very much being a standard way to express disagreement (although it is better to voice your disagreement in a comment if you think the conversation would be interesting).

[edit] seems I'm not the only one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406299

Fwiw, I'm not really a fan of it (and don't do it) either. But it's a lot harder to upvote not-objectionable things (so many!) and not upvote things purely because you agree (tempting!) - so I suppose it makes sense. I've thought before about making a 'proof of concept' type commenting system where its designed around not/objectionable; the default as you scroll past things would be to up-vote them (automatically), only down-voting on intervention when 'this does not contribute to the discussion'. Meh, might be interesting, but I'm not interested enough that I've gotten around to it :).

If you're considering this (I wouldn't), be aware that milk of magnesia is a very effective laxative, and other magnesium salts like magnesium oxide etc work similarly.

For the past few months I have had worsening discomfort/pain in my chest. It was so bad a few weeks ago I ended up going to A&E thinking I was having a heart attack. They did an ECG, sonogram of my heart, chest x-rays, bloods, etc. My heart was fine so not a heart attack.

They put it down to either a panic attack (possible) or a gastro problem so I am going for an endoscopy next week however I have a feeling I will end up needing a CT scan or MRI as I had high lipase levels in a blood test a few weeks ago that makes them want to look at my pancreas in my detail. It isn't urgent as two blood tests since them have shown normal levels and it isn't getting worse.

Plus random abdominal pains all over yet an abdominal scan shows nothing out of the ordinary.

Basically COVID has fucked me up long term. When I actually had COVID it didn't feel like a big deal, just a bit of a cough for two days and a little drained. But two months after COVID I started getting a shit load of problems and over a year later it is no better.

37 year old male in France fyi.

It's basically a cheat sheet to long hauler's clinical presentations, along with the diagnoses that they get. It's all classified and stuff.

I am pretty sure that I got COVID-19 in March 2020, and it messed me up severely.

But, your heart problems could be dysautonomia. I had dysautonomia prior to getting COVID-19, though, and I have a rare form of it.

Anyways, according to that cheat sheet that I referred to, the palpitations could be:

"Arrhythmia related to myocardial, pericardial disease or PE, dysautonomia with POTS"

The chest pain:

"Chest wall pain, GI source, pericarditis, myocarditis, established CAD, thromboembolic disease, etc."

This is the ultimate site on fatigue. Unfortunately it is in Norwegian, so you have to use Google Translate for the website (and the PDF documents--which are great): https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmatte...

There was some dramatic respiratory illness I got that took took months before I felt "like normal" again. I was a young teenager so I never felt like I needed to go to the emergency room. But the amount of time it took to recover back was insane.

I know I recovered by 6 months, but... yeah. That incident scared me for life. Sickness can be scary, not knowing if you'd ever get better from something...

I can't imagine the stress I'd feel today if some illness afflicted me for more than 6 months.

So far, ~all of the reports of "long covid" are anecdotal and post hoc. Which is not to say that they aren't real, but that there's no way of knowing what is causes by the virus, and what is caused by a year in which a significant portion of the population was isolated from contact and systematically terrified.

I've personally had "brain fog", insomnia, fatigue and distraction for the last year, and never had Covid. It's been a difficult, depressing, scary year, and a lot of people have these symptoms.

But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time.

A mental depression is... different. I know because I've been through both. In particular, depression doesn't have chronic multi-month breathing issues normally associated with it.

-------------

I only bring it up because the timeframes line up. SARS hit in 2003, roughly the time of my mysterious illness (though I never went to the doctor for it back then. I only knew about SARS because of COVID19 studies today).

Given that SARS and COVID19 have many similarities, I really do wonder if the experience I felt back then is anything like what people with long-COVID19 feel today.

Sure. Pneumonia can easily cause that. It takes a long time to recover from it, even if you're young.

Fundamentally, "covid" is pneumonia caused by a particular virus, so it's not surprising that people (esp. people who had serious cases) might have similar kinds of lingering symptoms.

Fine, convince me. Provide a citation from a study where:

1) the results are NOT gathered by survey from a self-selected population

2) the study is pre-registered, with endpoints determined in advance

3) the study is prospective, longitudinal and randomized

4) there is a control group

5) the participants are verified to actually have Covid

6) a significant effect is shown on the pre-registered endpoints

and I'll take your claims seriously. The only current study that I'm currently aware of that remotely comes close to this standard of evidence (but doesn't meet all of them) is this one: a controlled, retrospective study of 250,000 kids, which found that kids without covid had roughly equivalent long-term symptoms to kids who did have covid.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.05.21256649v...

I bring up this study only to underscore the point: essentially all current "long covid" data is self reported and uncontrolled, and when you start to be rigorous, the claims of severity rapidly diminish. Here's a relevant editorial in Nature:

"Studies of long COVID thus far—nearly all from high-income countries—have been difficult to interpret or compare, not only because of the lack of a consistent case definition but also because of systematic selection bias of cases, often without appropriate controls....Meanwhile, community-based studies have raised questions about the representativeness of cases compared with the general population, especially those using online recruitment, with many studies relying on self-reported symptoms and without laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Selection bias becomes even more pronounced when people are recruited through online support groups, where very high rates of often nonspecific long-term symptoms have been reported, even in children." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w

> Patients often show reduced lung capacity of 60%

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

> The brain fog is also often much more severe than just not being able concentrate a bit, people can't do simple calculations, can't follow conversations, can't read more than a page in a book, immediately forget things they just talked about.

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

> Many people become completely unable to perform their usual tasks.

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

Why do you need a control group? We know that typical people don't just randomly get coughs on a daily basis.

Anyway: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

A pretty small study (250-ish people) but plenty of evidence for long-haul COVID19, since ~20+% of them got long-haul COVID19.

-----------

Random, normally functioning adults don't have breathing issues under normal circumstances. There's just no need for a control group in that kind of study. The only question is how long do symptoms last for COVID19 patients.

There's a bit of self-selection since these individuals decided to get a COVID19 test to begin with. But otherwise, the % of long-haul COVID19 is high enough that we know its a real thing.

For you to be suggesting that long-haul COVID19 is entirely made up is just... ignoring the evidence we have available. You're making perfect the enemy of good: studies don't need to be "perfect" in every way to provide evidence.

-----------

Besides, you're playing "judo" with the argument. If you want to convince ME that long-haul COVID19 is fake news, YOU are the one who has to pull up the study indicating evidence in your favor.

I'm perfectly fine leaving this argument where it is and walking away. I don't _need_ to convince you of anything to be satisfied.

Because this is science, not a spread in the New York Times. And if you read the link to the paper I cited, you'd see that "typical people" do randomly get these "symptoms" on a regular basis (I'm coughing right now!) And in fact, once you control for this, you find out that some of what you thought was "long covid" was just...what happens in a normal population of people.

As for your paper, it fails the criteria established:

"COVID-19 symptom data were obtained at the time of acute illness or retrospectively recounted at a 30-day enrollment visit. A total of 234 participants with COVID-19 were contacted between August and November 2020 to complete a single follow-up questionnaire between 3 and 9 months after illness onset."

In other words, this is self-reported data. The control group isn't actually a control group, because the people in each group knew if they had Covid, and are self-reporting their own symptoms...in a survey about Covid. It's a recipe for confirmation bias.

A good study of this sort would follow N people over time, randomly selected and matched on various demographic criteria (age, weight, gender, etc.), split into known sero-positives and known sero-negatives. You'd then survey all of those people over time about a few selected health issues, without telling them you're doing a study about Covid.

A gold-standard study would find a way of objectively confirming the illness, and wouldn't rely on self-reported data (e.g. medical exam with lung volume test). But even if you can't do that, you can still do a lot better than this. This is just...meaningless. It's like taking a group of people who broke their legs in the last decade, and asking them if their leg hurts today. Sure, maybe some people have "long broken leg", but your experiment is a bad way to find out.

> Besides, you're playing "judo" with the argument. If you want to convince ME that long-haul COVID19 is fake news, YOU are the one who has to pull up the study indicating evidence in your favor.

Nope. Again, this is science. The burden is on the person making the claim to prove the claim. If you believe that Cooties are a thing, or that head shape predicts personality, or that fusion can occur at room temperature in a can of Mr. Pibb, I am not obliged to believe you simply because you want very badly for it to be true.

Your turn to demonstrate your science. Please, procure a paper that supports your point of view and simultaneously satisfies your requirements.

Science is not a black and white issue. There are "cheaper science" (surveys and other "lesser" studies), and there's "expensive science" (10,000+ experiments with control groups). Both are science.

But what you're doing isn't science at all. You're just shitting on other people's work without showing what you actually like. The papers I pointed out are in respected journals and respected methodologies, albeit cheaper than what you want.

But given your "standards", I'm convinced that the "studies" you want simply don't exist, either on my side of the argument nor on yours.

It's not "my science". It's just "science".

The fact that you keep trying to personalize this only underscores the point that you're not coming at this rationally. You're engaged in advocacy, not science.

> Please, procure a paper that supports your point of view and simultaneously satisfies your requirements.

I gave you the one I knew about that comes closest. The fact that there are no papers meeting the criteria for a good study in this area is not an indication that my standards are too high, but that yours are too low.

> But what you're doing isn't science at all. You're just shitting on other people's work without showing what you actually like.

Science is about applying skepticism to questions and demanding evidence. Again, we're not talking about emotional spreads in People Magazine here.

> I'm convinced that the "studies" you want simply don't exist, either on my side of the argument nor on yours.

The studies don't exist. That's exactly the point. And it's not "my side" or "your side" -- I have no attachment to the outcome here. Show me a study that meets the standards I set out and provides evidence for your claim, and I'll believe you. You can't.

If the best you've got is anecdote and low-quality data, then you get my prior belief in your claim, which is that you're probably mistaken.

However as someone who was diagnosed with C-PTSD back in 2009 and spent 4 months in hospital for treatment of panic disorder, depression and anxiety this is different to what I experienced back then. It is a near constant discomfort in my chest.

I am wondering if it is perhaps costochondritis or something similar to it? Perhaps costochondritis and anxiety that is making the whole thing worse? I wish I had answers. Hopefully I will next week.

For instance, is someone with Covid (who was on the verge of needing oxygen) more likely to have long term symptoms than someone the same age who got the flu/pneumonia (and was also on the verge of needing oxygen).

In other words - is there something unique about Covid? Or is that any disease that sets you back has serious long-term consequences, and Covid is just statistically much more likely to do that than the flu, for example.

> “If Covid didn’t cause chronic symptoms to occur in some people,” PolyBio Research Foundation microbiologist Amy Proal told Vox, “it would be the only virus that didn’t do that.”

> Even with growing awareness about long Covid, patients with chronic “medically unexplained” symptoms — that don’t correspond to problematic blood tests or imaging — are still too often minimized and dismissed by health professionals. It’s a frustrating blind spot in health care, but one that can’t be as easily ignored with so many new patients entering this category, said Megan Hosey, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19...

The extent to which damage is caused, and the extent to which the body can recover will evidently dictate the period of convalescence. Because symptoms vary wildly from case to case, pinpointing general routes of treatment or estimating the duration of recovery is a highly complex problem.

It rarely causes serious health consequences but for the people it does (I've known younger people sent hospital with it) are there long term consequences on the same order of magnitude? It doesn't seem like the data really exists for this.

I think the sheer range of long lasting symptoms is quite unique to Covid, although other diseases like Ebola or Smallpox would leave more severe damage.

No is my guess, based on anecdotes, experience and observation.

Afterwards, I have severe fatigue. I also experienced bouts, off an on for like a week or two at a time, where I could not physically get warm, and I was freezing to death, no matter what I did.

I also have severe dysautonomia (autonomic nervous system dysfunction) which I had prior to probably having COVID-19, which got worse. However, it is much improved now. People who got dysautonomia from COVID-19, by the way, can expect for it to significantly improve, or go away. Just focus on resting. It is a brutal disease, trust me, but you can get through it.

I also had cognitive issues, with respect to memory, which has improved significantly.

My best tip: Get a Garmin watch, that has the "Body Battery" function. It's a literal lifesaver. Do not let the "Body Battery" ever go under a 20 (out of 100) score, ever. You will pay a huge price if you do. Use the "Body Battery" to gauge if you can exert yourself or you need to rest. (It also determines if you got a good night's rest.) By the way, it works based on heart rate variability, and is quite accurate.

Here is a good Physical Therapy presentation on the current situation: https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/hpsp/if-hps...

Other tips: This is the ultimate site on fatigue. Unfortunately it is in Norwegian, so you have to use Google Translate for the website (and the PDF documents--which are great): https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmatte...

It is based on the book "Energityvene" which is called Energy Thieves. Unfortunately there is not an English version.

I hope this helps.

I did a search and Body Battery is available on cheaper models like the Garmin Vivosmart 4 ($129 USD). I put into DuckDuckGo and verified:

"Garmin" AND "vivosmart" AND "body battery"

Link to Garmin Vivosmart 4: https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/605739

Proof: https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/vivosmart4/EN-US/GUI...

I won't get a non-replaceable band one though, I have a tendency to sweat them to death :/.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=VOFJAsiXut9K19k1qEn5W5

By coincidence I was looking to buy a Garmin smart watch!

BTW I never had covid but if my body battery gets below 20, I also feel like shit. That´s the point I guess.

You may not want Google (e.g. YouTube) serving you ads when it knows you are in a very low body battery state, for example.

https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321

> These data support the idea that NAC could be considered as a treatment to alleviate chronic inflammatory pathologies, including post-viral disease

https://www.swansonvitamins.com/swanson-premium-nac-n-acetyl...

When did it become illegal? I've used it before and was unaware of that.

Here is a story about the FDA and NAC: https://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/regulatory/crn-petiti...

Honestly, I haven't used NAC in ~2 years. Have just heard about the drama from friends.

Given the prevalence of Long Covid in asymptomatic cases, many people claim that the severity of the initial disease and the long-term symptoms are not really correlated. So it's likely that seeking emergency care wouldn't have changed anything.

Wishing you the best of luck and a good/complete recovery!

I had a Covid positive coworker last year cough around me and directly work very closely with me immediately before taking sick time. I still continued to fail the antibody tests indicating either no viral contact or no immune response of any kind.

I don’t know if there is a correlation here but in a six month period last year I caught the common cold three times. The second of those times was a month before my coworker tested positive and the third time was a week after they tested positive.

Kind of the whole point of the immune system and the vaccine.

Contrary to some beliefs, Covid doesn't spread by people looking, touching or talking to each other. The latter has a higher chance, though.

It's highly likely you've never gotten it from your coworker.

Assuming you mean antibody blood tests, I don't know anyone who would willingly take several of them in a short time.

- pandemic in progress: check

- risky lifestyle: check (as in very frequent air travel for work)

- symptoms: O2 level drop, fluid in lungs, persistent cough, extreme tiredness, dizzyness, loss of smell/taste check all of these, and the rest, fortunately not. Later on: crazy beating heart for no particular reason, losing weight steadily but more slowly now.

Decision not to test was made by qualified medic, who said that they needed the tests for those cases where there was some degree of doubt, which in my case there really wasn't, besides that there was an extreme shortage of tests at that time. And to call an ambulance straight away, and not my house doctor in case things got worse than they were at that moment.

Keep in mind that there are vast numbers of people that have gotten COVID that did not get tested and that therefore do not show up in the various statistics. Especially in the beginning the health care system was totally overwhelmed and care went to those who needed it most, and either wasn't administered to those who might have benefited from it and many who simply didn't make it.

> Here, we investigated SARS-CoV-2 antibody and T cell responses in matched samples of COVID-19 convalescent individuals up to 6 months after infection. Longitudinal analysis revealed decreasing and stable spike- and nucleocapsid-specific antibody responses, respectively. In contrast, functional T cell responses remained robust, and even increased, in both frequency and intensity.

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/590/eabf7517

What matters to me is that I got through it, still live pretty carefully even now because I don't want a re-run if I can avoid it and I would advise anybody that hasn't had it yet and/or has not been vaccinated to go and get that done as soon as you can. This is no walk in the park, I used to be pretty fit for my age, and the last year has been a complete wipe-out. Avoid if you can.

yah, it’s the partial idiots who are hard to discern. complete idiots are the easiest to dismiss out of hand.

many infections have long lasting effects. you’d need to systematically rule them out/in via testing to be as certain as you claim to be.

Consider the alternative: you would have to come up with some kind of viral agent that did the same thing but wasn't COVID.

Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many. The test does not make the disease, it is merely positive confirmation, but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.

That happened to a lot of people. The first wave in March wasn't very big compared to later months.

You mentioned the flu season didn't happen in a different post, but that was much later, as was most masking.

> Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many.

That's a terrible way to analyze this. You were "one of many" either way.

> but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.

The symptoms aren't all that unique for a severe illness that messes up your lungs. There's no 'surprise' involved in other possible causes.

there is a real opportunity now for medical science to look comparatively at infectious diseases and attack them systematically and cohesively rather than myopically. hopefully we don’t squander that.

So unless you are going to go out on a limb to suggest a better alternative I suggest you leave well alone.

GP is playing silly games and I'm a bit tired of those given my rather personal engagement with this particular virus, and frankly, if it is some other kind of virus then it hardly matters now, does it?

Not arguing the rest of your claims, but that's objectively not true. Based upon current estimates it was actually worse than average[1] and its season was cut short in April due to the COVID efforts[2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_United_State...

17 months ago would be mid february 2020.

It sucks.

One of the things she mentioned is that many of the long covid patients had mild to moderate covid infections. Also at the moment they don't know why some people get it and others don't. So likely your not calling the ambulance did not make a difference.

Hope you'll get better, the symptoms described sound awful.

Interesting, could somebody more knowledgable say if this is possible?

Wish you a swift recovery in any case!

I think you're quite fortunate you held out and got better on your own.

There's some old scientific knowledge that oxygen [O2] in excess is toxic. I've submitted links about toxic-O2 here before, but these did not get much attention [4][5].

Some modern Fire/EMS first responders are well-aware of toxic O2 [0]. My uncle (an MD) knows about toxic O2, but he's not aware of the antidote. I was waiting for someone with credentials to call out the doctors for their mistaken use of oxygen.

I did find an MD's tweet that confirms the old research [1]. The doctor's tread is about how ventilators are harmful too, and how he can kill mice in 3 days with pure oxygen. But the MD didn't mention the antidote (5% CO2) that makes O2 non-toxic.

I've put some effort into tweeting about #MedicalHyperventilation [2] and SARS-CoV-2 [3], but no one consults with a non-credentialed former taxi driver (or his real-world persona).

My write-up: The Folly of Medical Hyperventilation: https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...

I've posted this with my pseudonym because it's sort of inconvenient for people to realize we've driven the global economy into a wall because our doctors are trained to apply pseudo-medicine: "if patient's blood oxygen saturation level is low, supplement pure oxygen", and more inconvenient that there's an antidote that makes oxygen nontoxic to the lungs and the rest of the body.

[0] https://twitter.com/slpearson2/status/997208010328965120

[1] https://twitter.com/robertpdickson/status/126525483948485427...

[2] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1407155149257154563 [1200] / https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1407185919795294212 [110]

[3] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1413730850626162691 [204/5]

[4] Mortality/morbidity: acutely ill adults liberal vs. conservative Oxygen Tx(2018) (thelancet.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993262

[5] Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) (google.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728

I got vaccinated, even during the second infection I felt extremely tired and slightly confused, I want to minimize as much as possible the risk of repeating again.

update: For all the down-votes. Time will say. But "A new study shows that first cases of coronavirus infections could have appeared in China between October and mid-November 2019". It fits with my experience. https://www.dw.com/en/covid-study-cases-spread-in-china-earl...

update 2: I arrived to Osaka Airport (KIX) on 9th November, I had symptoms 3 days later.

update 3: Stop down-voting the people that says that it is impossible. It may be the case, I am just sharing my personal experience in case it clicks somewhere. I can be wrong and it could have been a virus with very similar symptoms. I didn't wanted to start a war of up votes and down votes, that adds nothing to the discussion.

On what basis do you believe this was covid-19 and not some other disease?

But, of course, it could have been an equivalent disease with the same symptoms: fever, mental-fog, sore-throat.

It is just the timing, the fact that Osaka is visited by many Chinese nationals and the feeling was so similar that makes me quite sure that it was covid-19.

Impossible, cases did not appear in Wuhan until mid-late November. You must have had some other flu/virus.

I just feel to share it if it may help someone to build a timeline. And, as I have said in another comment, Osaka has many many Chinese visitors and I was in a very busy airport. I doubt that it took a lot of time to jump from China to other Asian countries.