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 had a friend think he had it 3 times (and the third time was probably legitimate). The symptoms the first two times? Typical cold symptoms. No fever. No major cough. No real loss of taste. I had another friend do the same thing.
This was back before tests were widely available. I have genuinely had it twice myself, but people largely have though for the past two years that if they were sick it was COVID.
Odd, I’ve had it 4 or 5 times maybe and only the first was like the real flu. But the long COVID is an annoyance. I did get the vaxxx do maybe that’s why the later rounds were so mild.
I didn't take the vaccine (I decided it didn't make sense for me) and have had covid twice. Once was likely Beta, the other likely Omicron.
The first time around sucked. It was basically a very bad flu for about five days. I caught it on a trip to southern Mississippi, and it didn't help that I had to drive >10 hours back home without stopping anywhere that I might spread it. I ordered medicine, food, and supplies for contactless delivery and drove it nonstop.
The second time I only knew it was covid because I was testing every time I had an inkling that I might have gotten it. I had a very mild fever and a runny nose for two days and nothing else. I isolated myself in my home office and managed to keep anyone else in my family from getting it, too.
Everything I've experienced, heard, or read strongly indicates that each round is significantly less bad than the last.
Doesn’t every additional infection also reduce the likelihood of you getting it again or even noticing you got it as it gets milder?
If I hadn't tested I would not have guessed that the mild cold I just got was my second covid infection. My first covid infection was quite bad even with 3 vaccinations.
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.
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!
From my experience if someone under the age of 50 has mild cold like symptoms or as you did only feels ill for about two days then the chance of it being COVID is IMHO higher than the flu. I think in young people the flu hits you much harder and you never get away with less than a week minimum of feeling ill but with COVID one could have no symptoms or mild symptoms for less than a week which is very common.
This is just something to think about. After I was called back in to the office and started seeing people more often I came down with what I would have sworn was covid three times. Absolutely the worst flu-like symptoms I'd ever had that I could recall, each affecting me in a novel way, but negative on covid each time.
They could have been false negatives, of course, but I suspect I just hadn't been training my immune system for many months and it wasn't prepared to handle the normal cold or flu viruses I would normally be able to handle otherwise. Since that period of time, I haven't come down sick since.
Not saying that covid is nothing to worry about, but it's something you might want to consider down the road. I don't know your situation or what health concerns you might have, but being too protective can have it's downsides as well.
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.
Did he actually get tested for covid both times? There's plenty of other illnesses that'll make you plenty sick. I personally took a few weeks to recover fully after the flu a few years back.
I wouldn't. For me, covid was just a couple of days of fever with no other symptoms. Strange feeling to get fever isolated like that. But I'd take
it multiple times over the typical knocked out for a week flu with multiple flavours of suffering. That said, I did have covid vaccine up front.
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 know half a dozen people who say the same. I wouldn't give this too much importance. The flu feels very similar to Covid. When I had Covid, I thought I had a normal cold with allergies. I don't think you can assume you had it because of similar symptoms.
Uh, no, I had it a few months ago and it was a lot worse than a cold. Not to mention potential long-Covid symptoms.
More importantly, my 85-year-old father-in-law finally got it despite precautions, and he had quite a hard time. I really don’t want to be the one who brings him a second infection.
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.
Me too. Flu is annoying to me but nothing I'd have even really considered a major health threat in general. Covid changed my mind with respect to respiratory disease.
When I finally contracted Covid (I was vaccinated + boosted in alignment with then current CDC guidelines), I ran the range of all the major symptoms like high fever, loss of smell, tachycardia, drop in O2 saturation, etc. Most of the symptoms persisted for several days before I began to recover and the tachycardia and O2 levels bothered me the most. I was actively monitoring my O2 levels and had they dropped much lower I would have gone to the ER as a precautionary measure. Even after the initial recovery, it took almost two more weeks for me to recover my sense of smell.
For me, Covid is no joke and it is absolutely insane to me how basic health precautions like wearing a mask to reduce transmission, isolating, etc have become politicized.
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