Ask HN: Have you had the Corona virus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you had the Corona virus?

38 pointsjacquesm30 comments

The title says it all, did anybody here contract the virus (and was confirmed)? If so, what was that like? Secondary, do you know people that have had the virus? What was the outcome, how did it impact them?

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Here are a few first hand accounts:

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/coronavirus-patient-from-diamo... (video)

https://www.adn.com/opinions/national-opinions/2020/03/01/i-...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/don-t-panic-says-us-woman-...

All three of these cases were very mild, didn't require hospitalization, and the people made a full recovery in a few days without any treatments.

I had a 100 to 104.5 F fevers, chills, sore throat and upper respiratory track infection over the course of 4 days with symptoms persisting for over two weeks back in the last part of January. I was tested for flu and strep, and they came back negative. My wife had similar, slightly less severe symptoms. My four year old daughter had the same symptoms as me that developed into pneumonia. Her fevers were up to 102.5 to 103 F The pediatrician prescribed antibiotics for my daugther who was already recovering. She was not tested for flu or strep, since I already had been, or that is why I think tests were not done on her. They were not diagnosing or looking for corona virus at the time in New York/New Jersey. It felt worse than the flu I had had two years earlier. I was very tired and weak as was my daughter. We are all OK now, but I keep thinking we may have had it. We spend a lot of time in Asian markets in NY/NJ, and there were a lot of people visiting the US from Hong Kong and China for the upcoming Chinese New Year/post Christmas season that we talked with at the markets in the weeks before getting sick.

I had 3 days of tired/weakness from 7-10 Jan, and a severe dry cough for about two weeks after that.

I strongly suspect I caught it from a friend that had travelled all over Europe and back the previous weekend and we were in close contact.

Unfortunately no way to rule out if I indeed had it or not. Would be super interested when an antibody test comes out to see though.

Are you saying it's possible to test for a disease after full recovery ?

I'm not a doctor but this is cool !

Not a professional so some of my terminology may be wrong, but here is how I understand it: after your immune system fights off a virus it often develops 'antibodies' to fight off the same virus if it should encounter it again. We can detect these antibodies via a blood test and thereby get an idea of whether you've had that particular virus before.

Yes, but confidence of detecting antigens becomes more difficult for some infections than others. And some viruses stay in your body like CMV. In the case of COVID-19, the virus does not remain, but the antigens do. The question is can the test detect them long after recovery. I'd like to know too for my own curiosity and to see if this means I am immune to it for this strain, this season.

Yes, an antibody test (a blood test) can do it. A swab test looking for the virus in your saliva probably wouldn't find any.

My wife and I had these exact symptoms in late Jan in Los Angeles. I’m an educator and noticed very many more students getting sick during this period than normal. Had I not caught it myself, I’d have chalked this up to increased hypochondria due to coronavirus in the news. But I find myself wondering if it’s been here much longer than currently estimated.

Mid-January in San Diego. Fever and head congestion. Extreme fatigue some days. Laid me out for a week and used my first sick time in years. Wife and daughter had less severe form exactly five days after my onset. It was unlike anything we had experienced before.

I worked at a large international company at the time and we had dozens of developers return form India and China after the holidays. It really makes me wonder if we had it.

If coronavirus was this far spread in Jan already then there would have been much higher positives in late Feb when people were starting to test outside China.

To an extremely high degree it was just the annual flu.

Not if you're only running tests on people ending up in ICU and not mild cases.

Looks like mid-February was the first spike in Italy: https://www.corona.cloud/italy

NEVER MIND. That chart appears to be global cases.

This is the crux of the matter. I believe this was widely spread in Jan and we are way further ahead than assumed

My mom had similar symptoms last week and got tested for influenza a, influenza b, RSV and COVID 19. All came back negative.

I add this anecdote just to show there are plenty of bad bugs out there.

I’m glad to hear you and your family are doing better.

Hard to tell, this damn Virus couldn't have exploded at a worse time. Flu season, Pollen count is high, and Corona is around.

Is there a test to tell if you've had the virus? (i.e. you have the anti bodies)? I think that would calm a lot of people. Still can't find an easy to test place in the US. We are lacking with testing so much... If people could get tested to determine if they already had it, it would help to return those folks back to the work-force quicker.

80% of cases show mild to no symptoms, so basically I could have had it, but I don't know cuz there's no damn test!

> gt565k 1 day ago [-]

>Hard to tell, this damn Virus couldn't have exploded at a worse time. Flu season, Pollen count is high, and Corona is around. Is there a test to tell if you've had the virus? (i.e. you have the anti bodies)? I

Soon, they think.

I had about a week of alarming, severe back and joint pain and shortness of breath/elevated pulse that I thought was a pulled muscle in my back just making a bunch of stuff act up. After hearing the account of the nurse in Colorado I now feel I may have been suffering from the Coronavirus, but now that I feel healthy the direction is not to get tested as far as I can tell. I guess I'll find out once a test is developed for antibodies.

34 year old healthy male, non smoker and no relevant medical conditions. Not tested [govt policy] but it's a completely unfamiliar infection of the lungs picked up in London where it's very much present, with mild breathing-related symptoms associated with COVID-19 and no regular flu/cold symptoms.

No proper fever [temperature may have very slightly elevated, but not noticeably so, and sleep fitful but I've had much more pronounced fevers before], I've coughed only a literal handful of times and not painfully, so clearly sufficiently mild to miss those characteristic immune responses, no headache or body ache either and only occasional feelings of fatigue and a bit more sleep than usual. Just inflamed lungs which were more uncomfortable than painful or restrictive, and this seems to have largely subsided exactly in line with the reported fifth day in which Coronavirus symptoms usually start to clear or occasionally turn for the worse.

Back when I felt completely healthy last Wednesday and went for a 3k outdoor run (no more uncomfortable or slower than I'd have expected considering I haven't run much this year) I obviously felt like I was breathing a bit too shallowly and breathing deoxygenated air at the end. The infection felt like basically that same feeling coming back the following day, except with a normal breathing rate [and heart rate]; most noticeable when lying down. No actual difficulties taking deeper breaths when I wanted [rapid breathing might have been difficult], but just breathing just felt a little uncomfortable and I can imagine how it can cause much more serious problems for people with more severe symptoms, pre-existing lung conditions or immune system issues.

Steady from last Thursday through to Monday evening, at which point breathing became much easier but I felt what was like surges of adrenalin which I assume was an immune response kicking in. Made sleep difficult but feel better today regardless.

28 year old male, USA. Same exact thing with sore throat. Funny enough, I noticed the weird breathing coming on while running a couple days before symptoms showed as well.

My wife was telling me of a post from her friend in the Philippines. A doctor in the heart center just passed away from the virus. He was treating someone who had the virus.

I really wish there were some clear demographic stats on people. Are they old? young?

IMHO I think better information would help calm the panic.

Keep in mind there are going to be a lot of instances where people are infected but are not confirmed. I know a couple of people who were / are sick, had C19 symptoms but were not tested because they weren’t considered high risk enough.

Not to my knowledge. I live 3 miles from the Life Care Center epicenter, and I have not met anyone who has it, nor have any of my friends told me that they have it.

It's basically impossible to find confirmed cases in the UK as little to no testing has been done. I and many others believe we had it. But it's just speculation

Well 40,000+ tests is a significant number. It just isn’t enough for the reality of a 65m country with a high incidence of clinically similar infections. Hopefully with serology/antibody tests we will get a more real answer of how many have had it.

Yes. Agreed

i've yet to meet a single person with it either first hand or through friends and family. even coworkers, not one.

There are currently only 4600 or so confirmed cases in the US, so it isn't surprising that most of us don't yet know anyone.

Real-time dashboard from Johns Hopkins:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...

The UI isn't entirely obvious, but you can get more detailed information by selecting a region (left hand side), then clicking on the arrow in the footer of that column to see the breakdown by state/region.

Confirmed cases don't mean shit. Reporting is garbage because we don't have enough tests available.

South Korea has been testing en-masse for over a month now and was able to get ahead of the virus spreading, hence the low number of deaths, whereas Italy's reporting is mostly people who already had severe symptoms, and people with mild or no symptoms probably aren't even part of the reporting numbers.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...

Even if the true rate is 10x higher, the odds of running into an infected person are still very low for most Americans. (At the time that confirmed rate was published, at least.)

Sorry for the slow reply; a windows upgrade took out my pc for a day.

"Confirmed cases don't mean shit." I agree the numbers reported are probably vastly under-reporting the actual number of cases.

But what is your point? The question was "Have you had the coronoa virus", and the person I was responding to said, "i've yet to meet a single person with it either first hand or through friends and family"

How does that affect my statement? Imagine this more extreme condition. Corona virus is real, it has infected 1M people, but only one person in the world has been tested, and the test is positive. If someone said, "I don't know anyone who has tested positive," that is not at all surprising since they cannot possibly know that anyone has coronavirus unless they happen to know the one person in the world who has been tested.

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