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’ve had both. This (long covid, post virus fatigue, whatever) is a few orders of magnitude worse, at least for me.
I had covid middle of March, and am maybe 50% energy most days, and have to do massive breaths every so often. After 7 months of “recovery”?! I don’t know if I’m even getting better... yeah extreme fatigue, brain fog, eating can be exhausting...
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 know anecdotes are not evidence, but I knwo two personally. Both had covid and no troubles breathing before they had it. Afterwards not so much.
I am not a medical professional, but I know these people and how their bodies functioned beforehand. The way they are now is certainly not a hard-to-diagnose chronic syndrome that is unreleated to them catching the damn thing.
I think we all got it at home. We didn't knew it was COVID so we probably spread it around. This happened in late February when no measures were taken yet.
Several weeks later we were told that person A who went to Milan was in the hospital in a very delicate condition. I want to point out that he is overweight. That person passed the virus to Person B who passed it to Person C who lives with me.
We all got sick. From almost no symptoms to mild symptoms.
I personally felt like crap for two or three days. I felt tired, I had my eyes burning like if I had a fever (I don't know if I had fever or not, I don't usually check unless I'm really hot) and I also had a cough for a few days.
We're curious to see if we have antibodies which would be pretty nice.
Depends exactly what symptoms they had. Rhinorrhea or cough are extremely non-specific, but if they had loss of taste or smell, or significantly abnormal low oxygen saturation, or multifocal pneumonia in young people - those are all a lot more specific given what we now know about covid
Judging from the people I know who've had COVID, it's different symptoms and not at all as severe. Also I'm not that young (mid 40s)
The adverse reaction to the vaccine was 24-36 hours of my life and now I'm fine. My friend who had COVID spent two weeks miserable up and down like a see-saw and then had long term foggy brain issues. Her husband had to go to the hospital to get oxygen.
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.
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.
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.
late Jan / early Feb becomes more possible. there was certainly cryptic spread by then that was happening over airplane travel. both of them getting it would be unlikely though unless both of them were in china or italy or had contact with people from there.
but you simply cannot diagnose covid just via symptoms. every symptom that covid causes can be caused by other respiratory viruses, covid just makes it more likely that you'll get more severe symptoms.
2019/2020 cold and flu season, before covid showed up, was also a particularly bad year, with H1N1 back and influenza B spreading at the same time (plus RSV, common cold coronaviruses, human metapneumovirus and everything else).
My roommates (likely) had it while I quarantined for a few months in a different location early on in this pandemic.
Their experience was extreme fatigue (totally exhausted going up two flights of stairs), moderate cough, and a very high fever they’re both healthy early-30s.
Everything I have read seems to indicate the severity is heavily tied to your viral load. If you get a lot of the virus your body has to fight harder than a small amount. This is part if the reason masks and avoiding indoor spaces seems to help.
Edit: They both recovered but one roommate says it took about eight weeks to feel “normal” again. No apparent long term damage, but we shall see.
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