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.