9 days maybe of lingering cough and sniffles, the worst of it is typically over in 3 days or so.
> colleague of my girlfriend nearly died of one in 2018 because he ignored it and went out partying...
Which suggests a mild illness? (The cold, not the pneumonia). You literally can't go out partying when you are really ill.
About what you said:
> 9 days maybe of lingering cough and sniffles, the worst of it is typically over in 3 days or so.
The mild Covid experience described in the article was 36 hours - your own words. So it was literally like a light cold, as the physicians also confirmed according to the article. You're lucky that you've never had to stay in bed with a common cold.
There's no way we're going to come to a resolution of this discussion without additional data given our evidently very different experiences of what a cold is. All I can find is sources saying that colds are usually mild. But since this also called "mild covid", that resolves nothing.
The illness was described as causing total debility for 36 hours, like food poisoning. That is much worse than a common cold, IMO, which generally doesn't stop me from doing any activity and is just a nuisance.