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 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.
As someone who tested positive last Friday after being vaccinated back in March--I can say the symptoms I'm experiencing vs. some of my co-workers who just got full-on COVID are MUCH more mild. I've had a little congestion, some stuffiness, a head/neck ache, and a little upset-tummy. Some of my co-workers were out for weeks with the heavy flu-like symptoms and I'm sitting here wishing I could just clear my throat and go back to work.
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.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything, I also became sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019. 3 people could very well be one guy showing up to work when he should've called in sick and then coughing at a meeting.
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).
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.
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.
My whole family caught covid around 5-6 weeks ago. Kids had super-mild symptoms (way less than the flu). I had pretty mild symptoms, but have had a persistent cough (I've had that with some other colds though).
My wife got hit pretty hard (no hospital though). She would up with a cough too, but the worst part has been headaches. Worst headaches of her life for almost 3 weeks. Thankfully, they seem to be getting more intermittent and less intense.
How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness.
I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.
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 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.
In the last few days of January and two weeks in early February in Manhattan, I (26M) got quite sick. The first few days were pretty bad and I had 102F fever. I had lots of difficulty breathing and a dry cough for around 2 weeks after. A friend/co-worker who sits next to me at work had essentially identical symptoms 12 hours before me lasting for similar amount of time. I think his breathing problems were less bad than mine.
The worst hit me on the weekend and I returned to work on Monday with the cough.
Around 1 week prior I attended a company holiday party at a large museum with (probably?) one thousand attendees from all over the world. They mostly came from the EU, but at least some from APAC as well.
I have no evidence that this was COVID-19, but in retrospect the symptoms matched reasonably well and I haven't been sick since.
So far I know 4 that have contracted COVID and all explained it felt like a bad flu but no where near enough to go to the hospital. But mileage will vary here for sure.
It's flu season, it's quite possible they have had both flu and Coronavirus. My wife had the flu in Feb & early March and the symptoms are identical to the Coronavirus.
They're working in a hospital so they'll catch everything.
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've had covid 3 times. Would rather get it 3 more times than get the flu a single time. Other than paranoia about having it, the actual symptoms have been a mild to bad cold for all my family/friends.
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.
Something really nasty swept through my office (in the US) at the end of January, and one employee actually died. Some of us were speculating that it could have been early cases of COVID-19, but symptoms only lasted for about 5 days for most of us. From what I can find online, COVID symptoms tend to last about 10-14 days.
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.
reply