I had Covid-19, and these are the things nobody tells you

Wishing you very best in the long haul, stay healthy.

The depression was one thing, but suddenly being a different person when you thought you knew yourself, and wondering if you should learn to live as this new, damaged person with its different emotional attitudes to everything (that I didn't trust were sustainable) or act like your old self working toward your old self's goals trusting in the wisdom of the person you once were---that was a different dilemma I didn't know I had to make, that nobody understood.

I wonder what share of cases have been spread by people "letting their guard down."

Not this time. In addition to the other awful symptoms you mention, I agree that the worst thing is the cough. It would seemingly just not go away. Painful, congestive coughing fits for 2 weeks. I basically couldn't do anything during that time except stay in bed and tough it out. Fortunately, I'd already been WFH for a few years and didn't feel well enough to leave the house during that time, so I was self-isolating without realising what was going on.

How can this still be a topic that's debated today? It's August now. We've known it for about half a year now, and with "it" I mean "surgical types of masks protect others, N95 type masks protect yourself." That's it. There is varying degrees of protection depending on exact circuumstances, and it's all a game of probabilities, meaning it reduces risk, so is mostly meaningful on the population level, and less on the individual level.

But come on, how can this still be a discussion? Even people in remote Peruvian or Himalayan villages know it by now, the HN crowd definitely does. There are more memes about it out there than contributions to this thread.

I also think shutting everything down is a politically safer move than not doing so and having to face headlines about X number of deaths in their district/town due to [politician], even if most or nearly all of these deaths are very old people who may have died from the flu this year or next year anyways.

> I am not a person who underestimates Covid-19 and take all the precautions that are required.

> So I wonder if a lot of the fear of Covid is based more on propaganda and social panic than on actual health risks.

You can inform yourself here about the differences to a normal flu: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm

I don't like how people point out anecdotal evidence in this thread as if it meant something.

The amount of above-normal-deaths in countries that have taken all kinds of measures kinda proves its not an overreaction.

We need to stop thinking of death as the only statistic.

Edit: Statistics are for policies. Our individual lives and the lives of those around us are our responsibility (e.g. don't impact others' lives due to our own recklessness and unwillingness to listen to reason).

Further, this repeated refusal of Americans of not listening to lessons learned from around the world (e.g. from those of us in South East Asia) will only count against American in the longer term.

Now compare that to almost 5 weeks of that (at least from personal experience) and no clue if it could get even worse. Are you actually in a risk group without knowing? Are you currently having vitamin deficiency or immunocompromised, maybe fighting another virus? Good luck with that. Not even talking about long term damage to your neural system. Fuck that.

Without better and deeper research on it I'll try to do my best to contain the situation as much as possible. Thinking otherwise means jeopardising friends and family health.

It's about the rapid spike in deaths and hospitalizations happening all at the same time because of how extremely fast it spreads.

The flu spreads slow enough that our medical infrastructure can usually handle the seasonal surge of cases. Too many cases all at once overwhelms the system, leads to more deaths than necessary, and potentially has even more catastrophic effects on our economy and supply chains than we've had if too many people call in sick at the same time.

To put it physics terms, the scary thing about Covid-19 is the impact, not the absolute force. A million people dying isn't too concerning compared to other causes of death. But if they all die in a single month, that's a huge systemic problem.

I don't think it's reasonable on an individual level to panic about catching Covid-19 compared to other health risks. It's akin to thinking death by terrorism is something to be more concerned about than dying in a car crash.

A few year agao I had a bad case of flu. Temperature rose again after a few days, which indicated a bacterial superinfection, which got treated with antibiotics. I was back at work after two weeks. But I have the feeling that these two weeks had changed by body. It took me about half a year to fully recover, i would say.

We often discuss who was hit worse, my wife with COVID-19 or me with the flu. Probably my wife, but she had her medical precondition, so we have not come to a final conclusion.

It's not just about one person's flu-like symptoms, which may make them one of the "lucky" one who can stay home and don't require more care (although read other testimonies in this thread because some experienced way worse than your bout of flu). It's also about people with other medical needs not being taken care of because of an overwhelmed system.

There are only so many available beds, respirators and medical staff. There have been plenty of examples of that in the past months, in Europe, in South America, in NYC, in Wuhan even, where people are left to die at home or in hallways because there are not enough resources to care for them.

They don't just die of COVID, they die of cancer, they die of heart attacks and accidents that would otherwise be non-fatal when cared for in time.

We're getting better prepared, but not everywhere. Under-estimation is the danger here. Saying it's no worse than flu is not true. It is a lot more dangerous and insidious. It kills more and, left unchecked, will stress any local medical system to the point that even more will die. Many of those who get it will also end up with years of health issues.

You may easily survive getting it, maybe even without symptoms, but are you OK with spreading it to your family, your neighbors, your colleagues, and their families?

It may also affects older people but the original SARS virus -a cousin- affected mostly young healthy adults, with a much higher death rate. Who knows how this thing will mutate and how it will change if left completely unchecked to evolve in the general population.

It's also not a flue in the sense that there are rare but serious long term effects that we haven't fully grasped yet. A small percentage of children get Kawasaki disease (or something like it).

Using the word "propaganda" implies political involvement which seems out of place.

And this, assuming a functioning health infrastructure, otherwise you get many many more ending in the last group.

That’s pretty bad, I’d take it - literally - dead seriously.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Pandemics

[2]: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...

(The heat map in [2] titled “Weekly estimated excess deaths by age group” shows excess deaths in Europe this year vs. the past three years.)

    > So yes, Covid-19 sounds kind of like that bad flu. It is bad, but 2 years ago we would just call it "a bad flu".

"The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans."

This isn't just one bad case, it's millions of bad cases. There's no flu that killed that many people in that short of time, ever.

From a quick research, it seems like the flu kill between 12k and 61k people annually in the US. The US is now near 3x the worst estimate and the year is still young, and that's with all the precaution the US is taking against the virus.

Personally I hope that this pandemic also makes us improve how we deal with the flu season. Wearing a mask at the supermarket during a season ins't that bad. Seeing more disinfection too isn't bad. More remote works too.

Long and short; You can only control what you can control... which is to say not much. Take precaution, but fear is occupying space in your mind rent free. I don't know about you, but I charge for space there.

There's a selection bias at play here though, a first-hand account of someone who suffered horribly is more "interesting" to the general reader (i.e. more people click, publisher make more money on ads).

Their experience was extreme fatigue (totally exhausted going up two flights of stairs), moderate cough, and a very high fever they’re both healthy early-30s.

Everything I have read seems to indicate the severity is heavily tied to your viral load. If you get a lot of the virus your body has to fight harder than a small amount. This is part if the reason masks and avoiding indoor spaces seems to help.

Edit: They both recovered but one roommate says it took about eight weeks to feel “normal” again. No apparent long term damage, but we shall see.

If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine? And yet all of society has turned this idea on its head when it comes to coronavirus. One report after another about how horrific it is. Constant anxiety and fear that takes a real toll on people.

Yes it's worse than the flu, if we take the stats in Los Angeles for example about 2.5% of confirmed cases have died. (Based on this it's a fair guess that less than 1% of all cases, including the unreported ones, have died.) Many people like the author have severe symptoms and then recover.

I have to wonder if this aberrant response to coronavirus says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself. A 24/7 stream of corona terror is being pushed into our eyeballs. How does that help anyone, especially the people who get sick? Does panic, fear, and a response straight from our lizard brains help us end the pandemic? Who decided that mass terror was the best way to beat it? I didn't sign up for this strategy and I bet you didn't either.

It started about three weeks (wait, is it four?) ago with a high fever, migraine, back aches, and fatigue. Then a few days later I started getting a bit of a soar throat, and a few days after that I lost my sense of smell and taste in about a day -- and that's when I knew. A few days later I took a test which four days later came back positive.

My wife and daughter were both sick as well. My wife's symptoms mimicking mine, but offset by two days. My daughter, well... kids are invincible, also being 3 she lacks the vocabulary to communicate much more than this and that hurts. She had a fever and a head ache for a few days.

The fever, migraine and bed rest lasted about a week and a half.

They were both given the all clear last week, while I got put on antibiotics and an inhaler because I was displaying some indications that it was migrating to my lunges. I seem to be in the clear now.

I'm 38 and a C level exec at a startup in a critical phase, and I am afraid to say that I've been defunct since this thing started. The fatigue has been crushing. But it seems to be mental fatigue and not a physical one (well, after the first week at least). I've been doing gardening and started a gazebo construction project while this was going on (being idle makes me go a bit nuts), sweating like a manic under the sub-tropical sun, but I've hit brick walls as soon as I've tried to focus on anything more complex than "man beat tree, tree fall down".

I can't focus on anything complex for more than a little while. Today I stubbornly started debugging an issue, but after my initial findings, and realizing it was a slightly complex problem, I had to hand it over to a coworker as I was completely wrecked after 10 minutes of focusing -- and this was the most work I've done in weeks.

I see some improvement every day, but it is very frustrating not being able to get any real work done. It's scares me that it has had this big effect on me even if I had a comparatively mild case. I can't imagine what other people are going through.

In the end, almost everyone is gonna get it anyway for it to stop spreading, precautions or not. Lockdown/masks/etc are more about flattening the curve (spreading the infections) than about people not getting it ever.

And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.

We really need to construct better social media platforms. Ones that reward nuance, constructive discourse, experience, etc...

And what percentage of people that get the flu, get it that bad? What percentage of covid patients are getting it that bad?

And how much more contagious is covid than the flu.

How exactly would he know that? From all the information going around the virus might do some nasty things to your body, which manifest themselves years later.