Same here, although I also had a cough and fever. My wife is a doctor and got infected at work, she suffered only a mild illness with mild fever on day one and then a cough for the rest of the week. After 7 days she went back to work (according with gov guidelines) and was never unwell again. When she was self isolating at home I looked after her and must have been exposed to huge viral loads as I was obviously in very close contact and didn’t change my behaviour at all. I was just there as if she had a normal flu or cold, so warm hugging her at night, still giving her kisses and going normally about life. 5 days into her isolation I got a fever as well and I had a very high fever for the first two days. Then it disappeared like it normally would and I just had a cough left for the week and felt a bit tired obviously. After roughly 10 days I felt like I was all good again and even started to go for runs in the park again and to work out at home again. Weirdly we lost our sense of taste and smell entirely towards the end of the first 7 days and it lasted for about 5 days in total despite all other symptoms having disappeared. It was a complete loss, like nothing I had ever had before. All in all the loss of smell and taste was literally the most annoying about it, otherwise it felt like an extremely mild flu like not even worth talking about. Luckily smell and taste came fully back, just suddenly one day it was back and that was the end of story. This happened in early April in the UK. Since then we felt great, no lasting symptoms whatsoever. I’m not a super athlete or anything, but I do enjoy sports and I have maintained a great condition and actually even feel a lot stronger than before. Probably because due to the extra work outs I get from all the extra time. This virus is just a regular respiratory illness and it’s honestly so mild I cannot believe how the world is going bonkers over this. I actually hope that the more people get it hopefully they will realise like me that this whole reaction to COVID is massively over the top. There will always be some people with complications and some who die. But that is literally just like with other viruses which we don’t care about. If you’re in normal health, are not fat and not end of life, then there’s nothing to worry about.
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
I’ve had COVID twice - in December and then just a few weeks ago.
Long haul COVID doesn’t spring back to life and give you a fever for 12 days straight. I had essentially the same symptoms both times: fever, extreme fatigue, a dry cough, complete loss of taste of most things, etc.
Long story short, even if you didn’t get tested one of the two times (I tested positive both times) it’s pretty freaking obvious what you have as long as you don’t have a mild case. My wife got it this time around, and we got her an infusion of monoclonal antibodies early as she’s pregnant. She only had a fever one night, and in trying to explain how she felt I asked her “it feels like you just want to stop existing, right?” She agreed. Before that night it just seemed like a cold for her.
4 people in my company, my sister and their spouses (so 10 all together) just had Covid in the last 3 weeks. 2 reported mild flu like symptoms, the others range between that and full blown flu. The least affected said it was like a cold but went on for longer. The ones at my company all tried to work through it and all failed to keep a full schedule, despite being the kind of people who might work through a cold.
I got the sickest I have been in years in December 2019. I had a cough for about 6 months afterwards that was sufficiently bad that I had a chest x-ray to rule out lung cancer. My partner got sick shortly after I did with similar symptoms.
I suspect it was the flu though. My desk neighbour at work was hospitalised for the flu (tested and confirmed) a week earlier. I had been vaccinated, but it's mayve the case I had a more mild case than he did thanks to the vaccination.
That being said, my partner is a nurse and was the only person in her department not to get covid. WE did get tested for covid antibodies in late 2020 and didn't have any, but it's possible they had diminished by then if it really was covid.
But the simplest explanation is still that it was just the flu.
I had the virus and it was slightly inconvenient, had a slight fever, cough and shortness of breath.
Strangly my wife had different symptoms to me, no fever and vomiting.
Lasted around 10 days with no lingering symptoms.
I think the fever is important because my wife got reinfected but I did not.
Anecdote: Metro NYC area. First week of March something weird ripped through my household. Wife lost all sense of taste and smell - complained she couldn't taste my cooking - and had a pretty bad cold. Kids and wife got weird pink eye at the same time with pink rings around their eyes. I was very lethargic during the same period of time and when I would lay down would get waves of chills through my body.
No clue if it was COVID-19, but it was strange. And we're ground zero for it (I work in Manhattan and used to commute every day on public transit).
I had the worst flu I've ever experienced in December of 2018, I was stuck in bed for a week, super sore, coughing, sneezing, fever-y, and specifically I was exhausted. On the day I got better, every single symptom went away over the course of 24hours, except the exhaustion. I was still basically in bed at 9pm and mornings stayed rough for a while.
I don't really know when it went away, but it was slow. Maybe a 6 months till I was waking up naturally again without an alarm clock, and able to go out late.
Not to downplay covid being provably uniquely-awful for a human body, but it feels like some sort of post viral condition is something we've all experienced to some (lesser) degree, but didn't have a name for it.
I had influenza in Feb 20 and the original COVID in April 20 (flu I got abroad and COVID I got from my wife who contracted it at hospital when she was on a shift).
Trust me, both took me out for a week, but the flu was 10x worse than COVID. The flu gave me bad headaches, fever and a super runny nose and sore throat. COVID only gave me fever for 1 day, a cough and a mild sore throat for 1 day. The only thing that made COVID inconvenient was the loss of smell and taste for 5 days but otherwise I felt fine and went in with daily life after day 2.
54, not vaccinated, my gf got it and I tested positive shortly afterwards. It felt like a moderately bad cold: Sneezing and runny nose early on, then a persistent cough and wheezy lungs. No sore throat, no fever, no loss of taste, no headache to speak of.
If I hadn't heard of Covid, I wouldn't even have taken time off work.
My wife and I both had COVID while unvaccinated. I actually had it twice.
She started off like a cold with extremely mild symptoms, but eventually developed a fever which was cut short by monoclonal antibodies.
The first go-round for me I had a few days of being tired with poor taste, and then it it full force making me incredibly tired with a fever of 102 for 2 weeks. The second time was largely the same but with less of a lead up - the tiredness hit right away.
Had it early in the year and was unvaxxed when I had it. Was 30 at the time. For me it a little similar to the flu in that I felt very weak, but it wasn't as severe as the flu at its worse, instead symptoms lasted a little longer than the flu for me.
I knew I had it on a Thursday after my partner was diagnosed the day before and I started feeling a bit off. Friday I started feeling worse, but it wasn't until the evening that I really started feeling bad. Saturday was pretty bad... I had a mild fever for about an hour, my head was killing and I felt too weak to do anything. Sunday was bad too, but I was starting to feel better. Monday I was bad feeling crappy but I was able to work and by the evening I was feeling mostly okay. For the next few days I had a mild cough, but that cleared up by the end of the week.
I didn't have to take any time off of work, though I was quite fortunate with my worst days falling on the weekend. I also have a pretty good immune system so I'm not sure how representative my experience is. I'm very rarely ill. I was actually surprised I felt so bad for two days, normally even with the Flu I'll only feel very bad for 24 hours or so, where as this was more like 48 hours.
It wasn't the worst thing I had that's for sure. I had glandular fever as a teen and that was worse by an order of magnitude in terms of fever, weakness and time to recover.
I've done an IQ test since having COVID, but mentally I haven't noticed any long-term effects. I've also had no long-term physical effects.
Yeah, I had a flu about 8 months ago. It was utter hell.
I was in bed for a good week and a half, the fever and just feeling like I was dying was awful, at some points during it I couldn't walk from bed to the en-suite bathroom without feeling like I was going to pass out.
Even about 4 months or so later the cough persisted to the point where I had to go to hospital to get my throat and lungs x-ray'd as I was coughing up thick bloody mucus.
It was hell, also rashes which I presume were caused by the fever are still annoying me now occasionally with random outbreaks of horrible itching.
Fuck that noise. I think that was the first time I've had the flu. If covid is even worse than the flu then I want no part of it!
i had a weird flu in april 2020, right as the covid panic really began in my region. knocked me out for 2 weeks, i lost almost 10kg, sickest i've been in a long time. ticked off every box on the list of covid symptoms.
but the PCR test said it wasn't covid, and it can't have been all that contagious because neither of my roommates got sick. so yeah, sometimes people just get sick.
Dec 2020: Two weeks of horrible flu symptoms for me & my wife (in our 60s). After that she needed oxygen, so 2 weeks in hospital and 2 more weeks in Rehab. I have Long Covid symptoms of fatige and lack of stamina still, 1 year later.
I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was hard to clear the congestion.
It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time.
It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again.
We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.
Reading this brought back memories. I caught it back in March here in WA state. I’m not sure when I got it. But I’m pretty sure it was the week before the lockdown (March 23rd). I was already self-isolating, but I just got careless one day. I went grocery shopping, wore a mask, brought my groceries home, put them away, and then ate something and scratched my nose. It was right then that I realized I hadn’t washed my hands after I got home and put away the groceries. About 3 or 4 days later, it kicked in.
My doctor was basically the same as the one in the article - couldn’t do anything for me. Kept telling me my case is considered minor because I can still breath and my temperature wasn’t spiking. I never hallucinated though. Feel like I missed out on that :)
My fever hit 103 and stayed there for over a week. A couple of days it hit 104. I told myself if it went higher I’d figure out how to get to the hospital. Luckily it didn’t go up. I was able to just stay home.
The chills were terrible. I was so cold and shivering so much that I couldn’t sleep. Eventually exhaustion caught up with me and I just passed out. I have no idea how I kept my dog fed and a minimum of accidents in the house. I really don’t remember anything from those 2 weeks. It’s just a haze.
But the one thing I do remember is the cough. I’ve had the flu, bronchitis, walking pneumonia, and even real, ICU pneumonia (to be fair over 2 decades ago so I don’t recall how bad it was), and the COVID cough was so much worse. I would curl up in the fetal position because I had coughed so much that I couldn’t straighten up. I walked hunched over because my abs hurt so bad. There were several times I’d start crying because I felt a coughing fit about to start. I don’t know if cough medicine helped at all, but I was drinking it every time I was lucid enough to remember to. I ran out one day and started panicking. I got really lucky and found a couple of bottles at a local Bartells. But I couldn’t go get it. I have great neighbors though. And one of them went and picked it up for me. They put themselves at risk to help me. They dropped it off at the end of my driveway and didn’t come within 40 feet of my front door. I waited till they were back in the house before I went and picked it up.
So yeah. It’s a “fever and a cough”. I really hope that none of you ever have to experience that “fever and a cough”
Edit: Some bio facts about me. I was 43 when I caught it. At the time I was training with power lifting, CrossFit, and a lot of rucking. If I really pushed myself, I could hit a 7 minute mile (not competitively fast, but fast for me). I would call myself healthy at the time I contracted it. No underlying health conditions (beyond bad eyesight and partial deafness).
EDIT: I’m 33 and my wife is 32 btw.
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