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Comment by harha | Hacker News Reader

I can figure out for myself if I have symptoms or not

Sometimes in society, we adopt laws that are about keeping other people safe more than they are about keeping yourself comfortable.

You might feel inconvenienced. Ultimately, you're the beneficiary of this too. Your life is going to be a lot longer, because the people around you are occasionally inconvenienced for your benefit.

If this isn't acceptable to you, I'm sorry about that, that's tough.

So?

That's not the point. You and I both know that not everyone will be upfront about symptoms. The tests are there to attempt to cut down on this.

How? I wouldn't know the difference between a seasonal cold (or flu) or COVID, mostly because I've never had COVID.

Every time I've gotten together with my family for Christmas the past few years, a very virulent infection has ripped though the household, getting everyone sick within a week, and taking me out of commission for a large part of the trip.

Every time I think to myself, "this is it, we all got COVID. I can tick off the symptoms."

None of those times were COVID (as confirmed by PCR tests).

More recently I was getting ready to go meet a newborn family member. I felt a little off so I took a Rapid Test. Guess what? I had COVID.

That Rapid Test stopped me from introducing COVID into a household with a newborn baby and parents trying to stay healthy to take care of their newborn baby.

You likely have had COVID-19 at some point without knowing it. In most patients it presents with minimal symptoms and is clinically similar to the common cold. Other coronaviruses that we classify as "common cold" viruses such as HCoV-OC43 are genetically very similar to SARS-CoV-2.

And you think everyone would disclose their symptoms?

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