Different people have different reactions to Covid. That's true of both unvaccinated and vaccinated. But the data has been pretty clear that vaccinated has resulted in a lot less hospitalizations and death for those that take it.

I'm glad you made it through okay, but statistically your risk was higher by being unvaccinated when you caught it.

Also if I was short of breath, a heart rate above 120 randomly, and had a fever of 102 (at the same tmie) during this pandemic, as an overweight asthmatic myself, I wouldn't have risked staying home and would have headed straight to the emergency room. Especially if I checked my Oximeter and it was in the lower 90s.

You can never know if the vaccine made it less bad. If you don't like anecdotes about how tame covid was w/o vaccines, don't say things like "it would have been worse w/o the vaccine".

But statistically it is. Unvaccinated people die more. Vaccinated people die less. You can't _know_ in a meaningful sense in your specific instance, but your risk is what it is no matter what. I'm not sure what's hard about this.

Sources please. Include the ones that get censored.

I'm not going to prove to you that vaccines work, sorry. Do your own homework, but remember that you're (probably) not an immunologist. Do what thou wilt.

> but remember that you're (probably) not an immunologist

Please don't do that. Besides, how do you feel about Dr. Robert Malone? Is he an authority enough for you?

Had you gone to the emergency room in lower areas of New York, you would have been accepted through triage (but not "admitted overnight"), given an EKG, given an albuterol nebulizer treatment, told to continue these treatments every 2 hours at home until feeling better. If the nebulizer fails to help your breathing at that interval, you would be told to return. And if you developed pneumonia, you'd be given an antibiotic.

How do I know? This is exactly what happened to my wife.

That sucks for sure, and I'm sorry that happened to your wife, although at least you got a little information from that and hopefully if your wife was in worse shape they would have identified that at that time and admitted her.

I would have also used the nebulizer before going in, most likely (I have one at home), so I would know ahead of time how well it was working out. Also I did say I'd check the oximeter I have first, and if my blood oxygen level was low then according to that I probably need to be in the hospital and they'd hopefully take that measurement and react appropriately (Hopefully. I know hospitals have been overwhelmed at times, especially New York's)

I am a bit lucky in that the hospital closest to me, so far, hasn't run out of hospital beds this entire pandemic (currently has 80 regular beds and a dozen ICU beds available), and my state has, with a little luck and some decent policy decisions, has mostly kept things under control.

Risk after-the-fact doesn't work like that. Probabilities cease to be probabilities after the event happened. Plus, don't forget about all of the dead people who are unable to write posts like this. I'm glad you're okay, but as the sibling comment said, your risk was higher, especially being overweight and asthmatic. If you win a slot machine one time, it doesn't mean everyone else will also win the slot machine. Getting lucky doesn't mean there was never any risk, it just means you got lucky this time.

Just a note for anyone reading this but if you want to take a pain reliever for covid infection, apparently aspirin is an ideal one because the feature of preventing blood clots is very useful in preventing the fairly rare but serious covid complications caused by microclots.

But maybe not if you're young. Aspirin is associated with Reye Syndrome in children with viral infections. Not sure I've seen whether this has been shown to be the case or not with COVID, but basically nobody gives their kids aspirin anymore so I'm not sure if it's been an issue.

My doctor personally told me that Advil, Tylenol, Aleve, and Aspirin are all acceptable.

Anecdotally, Advil worked much better than Tylenol. Advil made the body aches stay away for 6 hours, while Tylenol was more like 2 hours.

When I caught Alpha variant in February, I took advil/ibuprofen as well on the advice of my doctor. Didn't really have a headache more than a day though. I didn't know about aspirin's side-effect blood-thinning benefit pertaining to micro-clots.

But as stated elsewhere in the thread, I should have qualified my statement with "don't give aspirin to kids" due to Reyes syndrome. Totally spaced that detail.