As someone currently in the throes of their second bout of covid, I can confirm it definitely still sucks and sucks hard. Throat is better today, cough is worse, sinus problems are back but no fever. I got lucky last time so let’s see how the dice fall this time.
Just as a reminder to people if you are feeling ill, don’t fucking come into work, please.
Just as a reminder to people if you are feeling ill, don’t fucking come into work, please.
Fucking boomers that legitimately love in person. Had one coworker that had covid and was back in office 1 week after saying they had it. I immediately turned around and went home, telling my team I felt ill out of nowhere. So fucking selfish.
To be fair CDC recommends 7 days after onset of symptoms.
At least 7 days have passed since symptoms first appeared if a negative viral test* is obtained within 48 hours prior to returning to work (or 10 days if testing is not performed or if a positive test at day 5-7)
That’s for healthcare workers, for the general public it’s only 5 days, as long as you subjectively feel you’re improving and don’t have a fever. It’s stupidly fast, especially since around 20% of people are still PCR+ after 5 days.
While there are good reasons healthcare workers should be more cautious, they’re certainly not the only ones who should be, so that discrepancy between what is recommended to the general public (and by extension becomes company policy) and what they recommend to healthcare workers seems pretty bad.
This articles style of writing is so infuriaring. Mask wearing is the best thing everyone can do to protect themselves and those around them. It is proven that it works and works best when a) everyone is doing it b) everyone is doing it all the time, not just when there is a surge. It is not fearful to do the best things you can to protect yourself. It requires courage to go against the conformism and the peer pressure to reinfect yourself over and over again. There is nothing fearful about seeing the science about covid and long covid and doing the logical thing. It is being rational.
I have gotten it once, a year ago. Had a relatively mild acute phase of the infection. Still have not recovered. And I will keep doing my best in order to not get it again. I am not afraid. I am angry that the world has decided to abandon those that are disabled, immunocompromised, and those with long covid.
I have had COVID at least 3 times (I’m an advocate masks, but I live where masks are not a pop6choice,) and I swear my brain function has plummeted since my first infection. I feel so dumb at times because my memory has went to shit, I can’t think of simple words, comprehend simple questions or solve simple problems. It’s like having writers block but it affects all my thinking abilities.
My dad is anti-mask and his mental function has suffered greatly. During his first infection, he would ask the same question multiple times in a single conversation, and although he’s better now, he’s not the same as he was.
My symptoms during consequent infections after the first were not bad, in fact I wouldn’t have guessed I was sick at all the 2nd or 3rd time, so I have no idea if I’ve had it more…
Same with a lot of other health problems. We’ve had so many people who have gotten it, many of whom probably didn’t think much of it at the time or didn’t even know they’d been infected. That’s pretty likely to have population-level impacts.
We know it can affect cognition and increase risks for a variety of health concerns, but somehow the idea that those individually-recognized issues might start showing up in population-wide trends doesn’t seem to cross people’s minds. Instead we get stories wondering about why everyone’s gotten angrier, or worse at driving, or why younger people are having heart attacks. Certainly those things could have entirely unrelated causes, but the idea that it’s actually mass infection with COVID isn’t even brought up and then rejected, it’s simply ignored.
Recent findings involve research with the endoplasmic reticulum that appears to go off the rails when over-stressed breaking the mitochondria within a cell robbing it of ATP production and increasing lactate (related to metabolic acidosis) in the body:
My current reasoning is somehow to recover you’ve got to pace yourself just enough to encourage new mitochondria to form, but not so much that you experience PEM/crashing. The ME/CFS people have been discussing pacing for years. So:
Fail With
staying in bed for weeks doing as little as possible (a very slow success?-- mitochondria aren’t encouraged to form)
trying to train it away with exercise/exertion (a quick fail-- the stressed ER will break mitochondria and flood body with lactate and set you back with a slew of acidosis-caused symptoms that will take time for the body to resolve. e.g. kidneys excreting the acid, COVID diabetes from gluconeogensis of lactate into glucose in order to raise the body’s pH away from acidosis)
Possibly Succeed With
small exertions (signal need for more mitochondiria) before PEM followed by “intense” resting, cold exposure (ice baths or cold showers) and kidney-friendly diets (see: www.niddk.nih.gov/…/eating-nutrition ) to help the body process the acidity of lactate out to reduce ER stress.
This was a purposefully supplement-free/drug-free plan.
I am prescribed high dose creatine and CoQ10 to support ATP production in mitochondria by my physician who studies ME/CFS. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than I was before. And it's a very safe regimen to recommend.
Me neither, but I’m honestly not sure. I got sick a month or two ago, mostly just felt like aches and fatigue, pretty much no respiratory element at all. Except I lost 80%-ish of my sense of smell and taste until earlier this week (if it’s even fully recovered, I’m honestly not sure).
Was that COVID? I didn’t test positive for it, but maybe I waited too long to think to do it. I wish I knew for sure.
What kind of test did you use? The rapid tests are not always very accurate. A negative result might not mean that you do not have it. And yes, the time of taking the test / day of infection does make a difference. The loss of smell and taste does sound like it might have been covid.
I have heard that the newer strains don't show up on the tests, depending on the test. I got it recently, tested negative but it was my second time so I could recognize it and be fairly certain.
I tested positive in 2020 about two weeks before I got my first dose of vaccine. I was asymptomatic the entire time, only got tested because I had a medical procedure coming up. If it weren't for that, I probably would think I'd never had it either
Story time: My daughter got it near the end of finals week at university, and my wife and I drove her home - 5 hours is a closed up car - on what was probably her first symptomatic day. None of us were masked because none of us knew. She coughed once or twice, but mostly slept on the way home (as she usually does after a week of exams). I almost joked with her after one cough that she’d caught the 'vid. Next morning she woke up with a fever and tested, not actually expecting…positive. She quarantined in her room for 5 days, and all three of us pretty much didn’t go out for 10 days and we delayed holiday celebrations with the grandparents for two weeks. Neither my wife nor I were ever symptomatic. We used the two remaining tests we had on day 3 after the car ride and both tested negative, but decided the full quarantine was still safest.
Thinking back to the early New York outbreak, I remember reading an article in (April? May?) that semi-random population testing (I say semi because it was voluntary) for serum antibodies that covered multiple counties showed that around half of the people who tested positive for past Covid exposure had indicated that they had not suffered any symptoms of illness in the prior 3 months. The supposition was that up to 50% of the population had experienced an infection asymptomatically. While odd, it possibly explained why the spread was so rapid - people who were asymptomatic may have simply been vectors to infect many others as they didn’t quarantine (or, likely, mask since masks were in very short supply at the time). Regardless, I’m getting an XBB.1.5 vaccine when it’s released. Whether I got it or it magically missed me the first time, I have no desire to join the symptomatic club.
Yeah I remember being in the airport in January 2020 a week after starting a new treatment regimen for an autoimmune condition consisting of high dose intravenous steroids, and emailing my doctor that I was masking up, "But I'm sure that thing from China isn't over here yet."
Hindsight: yes it was. It was definitely everywhere already, just most of the people exposed weren't getting deadly ill.
Similarly, I am all over those vaccines. I don't have room for a bad bout of Covid in my life.
The grand irony is that my immune system is actually a giant bag of dicks most of the time. I spent the majority of 2020 receiving a course of high dose intravenous steroids to treat an autoimmune condition. That treatment regimen wrapped in October 2020.
Prior to that, we all - my doctors, my family, my coworkers - thought that if I got Covid, it was gonna be really really bad. Then I actually got it and it was a nothingburger lol
(I actually think I just got a really low infectious dose. I was with a patient who had tested negative the previous day, so I was only wearing a surgical mask. The patient tested positive on a repeat test the day after I was with them. Patient's only symptom was "I really don't feel well" and, you know, kidney failure. But the kidney problems had started for them before getting Covid.)
I’m having it for the first time. Fully vaccinated, on day 5 of miserable. Worst store throat of my life that transitioned into sinus congestion. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if it chose to go down to my lungs instead.
Because I’m 51 with a history of asthma I was able to start antivirals. Paxlovid mouth is brutal, but since I’ve also lost taste and smell, I’m getting used to it. While I understand why some people give up on the meds because of the taste, I’d rather suffer through that than risk worsening illness. I’ve found holding small pieces of taffy on my tongue to slowly suck on has been the best relief.
I work in healthcare and have always been conscious of protecting myself, but had a normal human moment last week and went to a concert unmasked. Be careful out there.
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