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.
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.
Had a cold a month or so back (tested twice for Covid, negative). Just some random crap my son brought home from school. Have had a persistent cough ever since. Just get through it like I have been for the last 35 years.
When I worked in grocery store had crap all the time. Then after having kids went through random sickness every 2 to 3 months. In fact I have 2 doctor visits I can point to pre covid. One in 2016 and one in 2018 when I literally went and was like I've been sick for 2 months. Doctors were like, yea you had some random virus, could take a while to shake it. Just took forever to get over it.
Why is this all the sudden a thing? I know Covid can potentially cause (maybe?) more damage than the Flu/or random colds but did people literally not get sick before Covid? Because it really seems like it.
Also are there studies on people who are hysterical about Covid getting more "Long Covid". I'm not saying there aren't physical symptoms. Definitely lost of taste or distorted taste is a big symptom, but could some symptons be mental too?
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!
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.
I catch a cold once or twice each year. This year was different as we have a son in daycare, so we've been sick about once a month. In January we all went through a very weird flu. Bowel issues, followed by very dry and sore throat with a mild dry cough that lasted for just under two days, followed by what felt like a normal flu for another day and then came the respiratory issues, for me. I never before in my life had considered going to the ER for a flu, but that one felt different. I had trouble taking deep breaths. The discomfort lasted for several days and I felt slightly exhausted, but still roughly 80% normal. After a couple of days of that I asked my wife if I should consult. We chose not to and I took a few days off and everything went back to normal. All in all, I must have been "sick" for about 8-9 days. (EDIT: I am male, under 30.)
The symptoms as a whole didn't quite feel like a flu, we all thought they were weird, but hey who am I to know, right?
Well a few weeks later we remembered that two days prior to feeling ill, we had ordered some Chinese takeout. The delivery man (not a Chinese national) looked like he was going to collapse. He had trouble getting up the stairs, had a bad cough, looked like he had a fever - god knows why he was working. After taking the food and paying, I wondered if he'd make it back down the stairs but forgot about it for a few weeks.
We probably won't know if we had this bug or not, but it's definitely possible. Maybe I just happened to develop a respiratory distress caused by a bad flu right when the epidemic in China was not controlled, and not any other year prior. Who knows!
I was in roughly the same boat. I got Covid relatively early in the US, late March / April. I was quite sick for most of a month. The weird part is that a low grade fever and other symptoms persisted for months and would come and go for weeks at a time, almost always tied to visits to a grocery store (happened three times, about ~5-7 days after visiting a grocery store, which was my primary exposure to such spreader environments). It felt like the virus being topped up, rebooted. To put it into perspective, I haven't had the flu in 20 years and never get sick for more than 2-3 days in a given year. My immune system seemed unable to kick Covid.
It took six months to feel back to mostly normal after the worst initial month of symptoms went away.
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.
I had the "flu", which started out different than any other sickness I've ever had. Started with a dry cough out of nowhere, and no sore throat/stuffiness, and then the horrible fever set in with an awful cough.
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.
I agree, that's why I've never really considered it was covid. It was just coincidental timing and strange symptoms. It wouldn't be my first 'weird cold'. I haven't even really thought about it much until I seen the comment thread here. Seeing other people's stories reminded me of it. It was just more of an anecdote to add than anything.
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. I get a lot of colds, and they are all the same. The day before, I have a ton of unexplained energy. Then my body hurts. Then my throat hurts. Then it's like that for a week. It is always the same.
Whatever I had in February was completely different. The cough is all I really remember. It is so rare for me to get a cough that even though I was around people that were coughing, I didn't really expect to get sick. But get sick I did. (Oddly the thought of COVID-19 never crossed my mind even once during the whole thing. I knew about it but I didn't make the connection at all. It seems so strange to me in retrospect.)
This. I had it. Literally every symptom except loss of taste and smell (but had some other rarer symptoms like the pink eye thing). Also had a cough for like a month, and loss of energy and breath for about a month and a half. Only just recently feel 100%.
While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.
Anecdote: a family member of mine is very COVID cautious and still hasn't had it due to long-term isolation. When he started seeing people a bit, so long as they had tested negative recently, he got sick from someone in my family who had a mild cold. It completely knocked him out, and he said it was one of the top 3 illnesses he could remember (he's a senior citizen). I wondered if the impact it had on him was due to the fact that he hadn't been exposed to anything (no groceries, no offices, no malls) in 3 years.
Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february, early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait.
We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative.
So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.
I got COVID just a few months ago and I've had a worse flu but it's definitely comparable. The worst of it was over in a few days but the general feeling of sickness stayed for the next 3 weeks. I'll happily take anything to avoid that again.
Yes. I ran a high fever on and off for 2 days and then kicked it. I had fatigue for about a week. I also lost my taste and smell for a couple weeks, which was probably the worst and most annoying part. But I’d rather have had COVID than the flu. The flu sucks.
We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.
Excellent question, and one which has gone through my head a few times since the start of all the hoo-hah.
Late 2019 practically no one - including myself - had heard of the thing. There were of course no covid tests at the time, so all we have to go on are symptoms.
The symptoms we had - they weren't exactly flu symptoms, they weren't symptoms exactly matching the common cold.
With a common cold, you get a runny nose and a sore throat amongst other symptoms. I don't remember ever having a high fever with a common cold.
Influenza, you'll get a fever, coughing and sneezing, and you're in for a bad time for more than 3 days. Last flu I had, the symptoms lasted for a week at least, with a recovery time measuring a couple of weeks after.
We each in turn were waylaid in bed for about 3 days, with a persistent cough, a fever, and generally feeling pretty rotten. No runny nose or persistent sneezing. This was no bad cold nor was it influenza - I've had flu before and know what flu feels like. Similarly with a bad cold.
It's why I described it as a "weird flu" in an email to customers at the time - we never encountered such an odd illness like that before.
The Covid-19 pandemic did not just suddenly begin early 2020 as if it just suddenly appeared. It was with us for a while before that, in 2019, and in many countries. Patient Zero will get it and it'll spread exponentially - it only takes 1 person who unwittingly caught it, they fly to another country, someone else there unwittingly gets it, they travel somewhere else, and so on and so forth. It takes time for the various health organisations around the world to begin noticing, start talking to each other, and make recommendations to their governments. By the time governments got to the "we must do something" point, that was early 2020.
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.
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