Ask HN: How did you catch Covid-19?
Anyone here caught COVID-19 while taking all advised precautions?
Just trying to measure how precautious we have to be exactly? Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?
Just trying to measure how precautious we have to be exactly? Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?
I got sick a few days later.
Went to the doctor who said they couldn't give COVID-19 tests since they didn't have it, but she gave me a regular flu test.
Results came back and I was flagged as positive for Coronavirus, but it came with a note from my doctor saying there was no way to confirm that it was COVID-19. I assume it was given symptoms and timing.
Covid-19 has proven similar to the common cold in transmission. The common cold is itself a corona virus so it makes sense.
Basically you are going to be exposed to Covid-19 at some point in your life. It's guaranteed. It's here to stay with the human race, just like the common cold corona's.
But there is value in delaying your exposure, even if you have little personal risk. Delaying your own infection also delays the infection of others (more vulnerable than you). They may be holding out for a vaccine. It avoids overloading a hospital. It gives the medical community more time to develop best practices and apply them to more people. If everyone gets covid-19 on day 1 then no one gets to benefit from the hard won knowledge paid for in death and damaged lung tissue.
Viruses tend to become less deadly as they mutate. Delaying your infection has value, even if it's inevitable.
Luckily I had a mild reaction, but I still feel a slight tickle/burning in the lungs 2 months into it.
To the best of my knowledge I have not lost lung capacity. I can mow the lawn (.3 acre) with a push mower in 1 go without stopping in hot weather.
Had a mild headache and mild sore throat at the height of it. Body was mildly achy in the evening near/at bed time. Occasional cough near the tail end of the recovery. For me this was not a cough heavy sickness.
No medication used. Lifted weights throughout the entire process. Symptoms were very mild but lasted forever.
Overall my personal symptoms were mild enough that I was not suffering. This is not to downplay. Other people have strange effects, such as "covid toes" where the flesh in their toes die. Or their immune system reacts causing inflammation in the lungs with serious damage to tissue. One bad thing about new viruses is a strong immune system can sometimes bite you. It was a big issue in the 1918 flu that was most deadly to people in their 20's. Elderly were relatively untouched by the 1918. Luckily Covid-19 has not proven to be particularly dangerous to young people so far. But it is causing bad immune responses in some young people, even if not at a large scale like the 1918 virus.
Just FYI, "common cold" is not meant to downplay the deadly effects, especially if you know the history of the cold. The mention of cold was to draw similarities in how it is transmitted (what the OP's question was about).
One of the guys on my team got Covid. The girl sitting in next cube also got it. He said it was like a pretty bad flu, but they both recovered.
My neighbor had it, but he was in Westchester county NY running his cleaning business. He thought it was just stress from all the work. He went to a local urgent care down the road and that is how he found out he has the anti-bodies.
My other neighbor's grandmother had it, she was 85. They gave her the experimental plasma as she did not look like she was going to make it. She recovered thankfully.
So far I only know of one person that passed away from it. A good friend had a mentor who was 63. He was over in London and was forced into a NHS hospital. He passed away from the Covid.
On the note of being cautious, I still would like a formal study done on surface transmission. There has been some much misinformation on this. There was a study cycling on the news months back. CDC did an update to their site recently and all the news sites reported the study was flawed. On May 22, CDC updated website to provide clarification which essentially said they don't know about surface transmission risks.
Several weeks later we were told that person A who went to Milan was in the hospital in a very delicate condition. I want to point out that he is overweight. That person passed the virus to Person B who passed it to Person C who lives with me.
We all got sick. From almost no symptoms to mild symptoms.
I personally felt like crap for two or three days. I felt tired, I had my eyes burning like if I had a fever (I don't know if I had fever or not, I don't usually check unless I'm really hot) and I also had a cough for a few days.
We're curious to see if we have antibodies which would be pretty nice.
February was the last time I got sick, covid-like symptoms, and going back through my slack out-of-office channel a lot of people at my office did too.
Nobody knows precisely. It's a brand new pathogen. Research is still being done.
> Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?
What's your comfortable level of risk? How wide is your sense of self? Does it include your neighbors? passers by? their neighbors and their grandparents?
Obesity increases risk of covid-19 (and many other diseases). It's not the largest (other than age) risk factor.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v...
> In summary after full adjustment, death from COVID-19 was strongly associated with: being male (hazard ratio 1.99, 95%CI 1.88-2.10); older age and deprivation (both with a strong gradient); uncontrolled diabetes (HR 2.36 95% CI 2.18-2.56); severe asthma (HR 1.25 CI 1.08-1.44); and various other prior medical conditions. Compared to people with ethnicity recorded as white, black people were at higher risk of death, with only partial attenuation in hazard ratios from the fully adjusted model (age-sex adjusted HR 2.17 95% CI 1.84-2.57; fully adjusted HR 1.71 95% CI 1.44-2.02); with similar findings for Asian people (age-sex adjusted HR 1.95 95% CI 1.73-2.18; fully adjusted HR 1.62 95% CI 1.43-1.82).
> Conclusions
> We have quantified a range of clinical risk factors for death from COVID-19, some of which were not previously well characterised, in the largest cohort study conducted by any country to date. People from Asian and black groups are at markedly increased risk of in-hospital death from COVID-19, and contrary to some prior speculation this is only partially attributable to pre-existing clinical risk factors or deprivation; further research into the drivers of this association is therefore urgently required. Deprivation is also a major risk factor with, again, little of the excess risk explained by co-morbidity or other risk factors. The findings for clinical risk factors are concordant with policies in the UK for protecting those at highest risk. Our OpenSAFELY platform is rapidly adding further NHS patients' records; we will update and extend these results regularly. Keywords COVID-19, risk factors, ethnicity, deprivation, death, informatics.