Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

There was a similar article in the NYT recently by a woman whose husband contracted COVID, had a relatively 'normal' pneumonia, but the article read like a war report out of an Ebola zone, allusions to Chernobyl the TV series, and COVID as a silent killer, and so on.

Now I don't want to diminish the personal experience of anyone, but I'm still surprised how many people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who ought to have had personal experience with tragedy and illness seem to have serious psychological trouble coping with the simple fact that we're for a while living in a pandemic and that life has become somewhat more dangerous.

It's not that I'm personally not worried at all, but there has to be some perspective. Life is more dangerous, but it's always somewhat dangerous. I wonder if it's, in particular, a phenomenon of affluent societies that haven't had to deal with serious stressors in a long time.

If you've ever been to Israel and lived there for a while and you go to a wedding and five minutes later there's a bomb alarm and there's pretty much rockets flying your way all the time, and you observe how resilient people are in coping with danger in their life, observing a lot of cultural response here worries me a lot.

The dull chest pain sticks around for a surprisingly long amount of time. I'm at day 25 now since my ER visit and just noticed that I haven't felt any of that dull pressure in at least 2 or 3 days at this point.

I feel I arrived at a similar place to the author but on a much less romantic path. Not sure if I would have the same experience if the illness actually felt life threatening in an active way (e.g. breathing problems like the author experiences).

For the record, I don't think this is an accurate representation of the situation.

The world has done a remarkable job of coming up with ventilators, masks and new practices on the fly in the face of overwhelming demand and labor shortages.

The ventilators aren't working as well as expected, so doctors are collaborating via internet in real time to come up with other options. New hypotheses concerning the pathology of the condition are already emerging.

Also, with internet access, you can google up medically recommended airway clearance techniques, recommended OTC drugs, etc. You can double check that it's a reputable source and an established practice for management of lung issues.

Covid19 is not the first time people have been faced with managing deadly lung issues. You can find good info on that very thing by searching for resources for cystic fibrosis. It's very deadly and people routinely manage it from home with medically approved and doctor recommended treatment modalities.

At the point when my fever started getting more severe is about the same time people were going absolutely crazy buying everything up - my girlfriend couldn't even find a thermometer or medicine to keep my fever down. Luckily I had a friend who overnighted a bunch of supplies to me.

It's really scary to realize there is a possibility that you could die, alone, in a hospital, unable to have family visit. The lowest my blood oxygen got was 89% -- I'm fortunate that if I had CVD19 I seem to have got the "light" version of it and never reached the respiratory distress that would put me in the hospital.

I strongly suspect that the reported infections in CO are off by a lot - it wouldn't surprise me to find out it is/was off by an order of magnitude.

The uncertainty has been eased by a little gizmo to measure the oxygen saturation in blood, which I got on amazon for £75 as soon as it was obvious that I could not breath well. I am probably fine as long as the saturation is > 92% or so.

Of course I have doubts about the reliability of a medical device off amazon, but it seems well done and, interestingly, it gives my mind a piece of seemingly objective truth to latch on.

[Edit - saturation level that will make me go to the hospital]

Has anyone calculated what are the probabilities of infection in an area with an active infection cluster while practicing social-distancing and other hygiene measures?

But then a few weeks ago we all started to sneeze, cough, and run low grade fevers. Wife lost her sense of smell. And then a bunch of symptoms between us that I later learned are all coronavirus symptoms.

The dominant things for me was the shortness of breath, and the extreme fatigue. Like, feeling like you’ll just go “goodnight!” and collapse on the kitchen floor fatigue.

The breathing was the most disconcerting. I’d wake up in the morning thinking I was getting better, but by the afternoon I’d feel like someone was sitting on my chest. The cough never really got crazy bad for me. Where a panic attack might feel like you can’t catch your breath, this felt more like trying to breath under a swimming pool.

Caring for 3 young kids with a sick spouse has been... a test, lol. But fortunately we’re all young and healthy and things are returning to normal. As slowly as it came on. Luckily I stocked up on things just in case, but at the height of being sick it was impossible to get any grocery delivery windows. They did finally come through about a month into this process, so, feeling grateful all around.

I had what would be called a “mild” case, but it definitely sucked. Looking forward to antibody testing so we can know fo sure it’s what we had, but based on all of the symptoms, the long incubation time, etc, it seems very likely.

I know this is not the main topic of this article, but I’ll steal this sentence to convey the importance of taking precautions against COVID-19 to people who feel that it’s statistically irrelevant.

Not knowing if you properly decontaminated that last batch of groceries is nerve wracking.

People are just way too sure it was that one virus. There are other viruses that can cause similar symptoms.

A little more useful than "it'll be fine"? eh?

I honestly hate the empty empathy from people with no say in the matter. Its cultural and I think it develops into a mental issue of denial. Saying "you'll die if you don't breathe, I don't want that" is good enough, for me. People of some cultures would say that. Are we really worried about the patient losing the will to live without other people's hopium? Is that really a co-morbidity?

Sorry if I sound salty, I just finished doing a bunch of interviews where other people told me it'll be fine and it wasn't and I already knew how random it is. These are binary events.

I can accept the randomness of not being rewarded for doing the "right thing"

It's easy to say, "It's a panic attack". It does not appear to be life threatening. But boy does it feel life threatening. The doctors all say, "We can't find anything wrong with you" (apart from you heart racing randomly, your blood pressure spiking to dangerous levels, heart paplitations and various other problems). But what if they missed something? It's pretty hard to gamble your life on this stuff. I was absolutely fine until one day I wasn't. Something must have changed.

One of the problems with getting symptoms and not being able to diagnose the illness exactly is that you will never know. Pain in your chest. Difficulty breathing. Complete lethargy. It could be corona virus. It could be a panic attack brought on by worrying about the corona virus. You will never know unless you are tested (and even then it might not be right).

My experience has been that sometimes I take comfort in imagining that I have some strange disease that nobody knows about. It certainly feels better to me than, "My nervous system is making me ill through stress that I don't know how to relieve". But, I've also found that if I believe I'm ill, then the symptoms feel worse as well, even though I get some psychological relief from the stress of experiencing the symptoms.

The best way that I've come to deal with the problem is simply to believe that I will feel well again soon. I may feel bad now, but soon I will feel better. I may have an illness. I may not have an illness. It may be life threatening. It may not. Even if it is life threatening, there is nothing more I can do. So it is best to believe that I will feel better soon. This has helped me immeasurably, even though it is quite difficult to do.

I recently (and as a last resort) had a sleep test. I averaged 52 apnic arousals per hour. In other words, at most I was sleeping for a minute or so at a time. They gave me a cpap machine and while I would be lying if I said all my symptoms are magically going away immediately, I do feel a lot better now that I've started to get used to the machine.

But the reality is that your belief is powerful medicine in an of itself. Whether your are ill or not. Whether you have corona virus, or the flu, or whether you are just very tired and stressed: believing that you will feel better soon will help enourmously in my experience.

My wife is a doctor and she caught it at work. She and 7 other doctors (8 in total) all fell ill in the same week. This was about 3 weeks ago.

My wife had a bit of fever for the first 2-3 days (~38C), and she mostly suffered from a bad headache for about a week, and a cough (mild) for about two weeks and a sore throat (mild) for the first few days. After a few days she also lost her taste and smell of food which all came back on day 12 roughly. She is also in her super early 30s and never had shortness of breath or other issues with the lungs. After 7 days she even returned to work as her body has fought off the virus by then (even though some symptoms might remain like a cough).

I contracted the virus from her obvioulsy whilst she was quarantined at home for 7 days. After 5 days I also started to get my first symptoms. It started with a lot of fatigue, a sore throat and really high fever. During the first two days I had >39C fever, lots of shivers, cold sweats, and just feeling terribly tired.

Whilst that sounds terrible it was not anything different from what I experienced from previous flus. When my fever soared I felt totally shit, but as soon as the paracetamol kicked in and my fever declined I was feeling better and was even able to do minor tasks at home.

My sore throat lasted for about a week, it first got worse and then disappeared. I also developed an annoying dry cough after 5 days which stuck with me for about a week. Today I have a mini cough left a bit, but that is normal again, just like with a normal cold a cough can stick with someone for weeks after being completely fine again.

My fever disappread after the first 2 days. I also had terrible headaches, which were the worst and lost my smell and taste, but no shortness of breath. I was actually documenting all my symptoms every day and I'm thinking of uploading it to YouTube.

Overall I have to say if there was no stigma with COVID-19 I would have not even lost a second of a thought thinking that I was seriously ill. It was honestly a really mild flu after all. The actual flu which I had earlier this year was much worse if I'm honest. Not even two weeks after I got my first symptom I was working out in my garden and doing some mild cardio exercises again. Normally when I get a cold it affects my sinuses which means that I can't do cardio for at least two full weeks as I always struggle to breath through my nose for quite some time, but COVID-19 doesn't normally give you a runny nose and it didn't give me one indeed which means that in my case COVID-19 was even much nicer to get than a regular cold.

There's a lot of bad stigma and panic around COVID-19, but after all it's just a new repiratory coronavirus, just like colds and the flu your body should be able to fight if off normally without any real issues, unless you already have some serious problems.

It's important to remember that COVID-19 is not a lottery or survival by luck. It is a mild illness if you are a healthy and relatively young human being. It does discriminate against fragile, old and people with a pre-existing conditions. If this wasn't true then we would see a much more evenly spread death rate, but we don't because to most people who are fine this is barely an illness.

There's only two types of people who die from it:

- People with a pre-existing health condition

- People with a pre-existing health condition who don't know about it yet because no doctor has diagnosed it yet

Healthcare systems of many countries are cornered by these assumptions: 1) light ozone generators cannot do a thing because they produce tiny concentrations of gas 2) the ozone is toxic.

While both of those statements are somewhat true, here is the thing.

The dangerous side of Covid-19 is its ability to target lungs in a fraction of patients. While this is a dangerous situation, it also makes it potentially susceptible to inhale treatments.

Now back to ozone. It is basically a recombined atoms of oxygen, but instead of ubiquitous O2, ozone is O3. As you might expect, it has higher oxidizing ability. Human can safely breathe ozone as long as its concentration goes below 0.2 mg/m3.

Ozone is not only a breathable gas. It also has an ability to disinfect. For example, it deactivates the viruses by over-oxidizing its surfaces.

Regarding the concentrations. It was shown that to kill 90% of SARS-CoV you would need an exposure of 20-112 mg / m3 during one minute. Which sounds like a lot but bare with me.

A disinfection with ozone has an accumulative effect, pretty much like with UV or radiation. For instance, a home ozonator (ozone generator) typically produces a concentration of 0.02 mg/m3. It would not kill the virus in a minute. But it will start to do so in 17 hours of exposure (20 mg/m3 / 0.02 mg/m3 / 60 min/hour = 16.6 hours).

Ozone can be generated in several ways. One of those is by exposing the air to UV-C. This is a preferable method for virus situation, because not only the desired gas is generated, but also because UV-C light has an ability to disinfect the air and surfaces by itself. A win-win.

Please note that UV-C may be critically dangerous to skin and eyes. To overcome that problem, UV-C lamp should be placed in a black or UV insulating box, where only a small laminar flow of air produced by the fan is exposed to UV-C. The suggested power of such a lamp would be something < 10W where 3W looks like a sweet spot for a 18 m2 room.

Now to effects: tiny fractions of ozone would cause a small sedative effect. If the breath is difficult then you may find a tiny amount of O3 more supportive comparing to conventional air mixture which is already a big bonus.

In 17 hours or so of exposure, you are going to feel better, as the consumed concentration is already promises to deactivate a substantial amount of exposed virus material (like 90%).

The good things do not end here, as deactivation rate is exponential and in 34 hours you are going to get 99% of exposed virus material deactivated.

Now to the not so good things: ozone is slightly toxic and you would not be able to use it for too long. 3 days of presumably safe concentration is already close to a stretch. It not only damages viruses and bacteria, it also over-oxidizes human cells which leads to their eventual damage. It is usually felt like a soar throat.

The important points to consider when trying to implement the experiment like this: 1) safe O3 concentration 2) no direct human exposure to UV-C 3) room should be on a smaller side, as it is easier to control (8-20 m2 is a sweet spot) 4) the room should be mostly closed, do not ventilate the room more often than once or twice per 24 hours for short periods of time like 5-10 minutes; note, that you still need an air to breathe, so a "mostly closed room" would not mean a "scientifically firmly closed room".

Did I try this extreme idea myself before publicly suggesting it? Yes, I did. Though for more conventional viruses like seasonal flu. I was never officially diagnosed with Covid-19, but I'm pretty confident I went through it in the middle of February when nobody had a test yet.

The idea may sound controversial to the most of population nowadays. But it surely is effective on viruses as I've experimented with it for 7 years.

I am putting this publicly to spark the minds of researches, including professionals. This is a low hanging fruit so I'm surprised to admit that nobody had tried it before in scientifically controlled environment, with control groups and stuff.

DISCLAIMER: If you do this you do it on your own risk. The large dozes of ozone and UV can be extremely dangerous and may lead to fatal consequences or even death. This is not a scientifically proven treatment of Covid-19.

I actually wonder if some controlled exposure might be a good thing, I can get it and (statistically) recover from it at a place away from my family, and then come back and be the one that does everything for everybody.