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Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

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Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#141

Post by krageon »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #140
krageon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, amphetamines work as a decongestant as well. I'm not sure I'd say it's a good choice, but it is a choice.

Amphetamines are also known as speed and, among other things, they raise your heart rate. Coronavirus is apparently also raising the heart rate and doing damage to the heart for some people. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20170210/... I would guess this is probably not something you want to take if Coronavirus is already elevating your heart rate.

I did say it wasn't a good choice, all I said it did is work as a decongestant. Nobody is making claims that you should take amphetamines (let alone street amphetamines), sick or otherwise.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#142

Post by Kaiyou »

Barrin92 wrote: post #42

I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about the psychological nature of this pandemic. The author of the article is 39 years old, I'm quite surprised by the severity of the experience that he reports. There was a similar article in the NYT recently by a woman whose husband contracted COVID, had a relatively 'normal' pneumonia, but the article read like a war report out of an Ebola zone, allusions to C…

I'm thinking of this as a temporary hysteria. Nothing much you can do to reason with hysterical people. The only thing that sometimes works for hysteria is a good slap in the face.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#143

Post by Kaiyou »

wccrawford wrote: post #138
Barrin92 wrote: post #42

I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about the psychological nature of this pandemic. The author of the article is 39 years old, I'm quite surprised by the severity of the experience that he reports. There was a similar article in the NYT recently by a woman whose husband contracted COVID, had a relatively 'normal' pneumonia, but the article read like a war report out of an Ebola zone, allusions to C…

I'm in my 40s and haven't had to deal with any really crazy situations like this. It isn't just that there's a possibility that 1 person I love could die from this, there's a possibly that any of them could. And the older they are, the more likely that they could die from it. On top of that, I can't spend time with them in the way that I would if I knew they were at risk. I have to stay away from them instead. It's t…

Anyone could die in a car crash, but that doesn't really get people worried. There's a million ways to die at any moment, but people just don't worry about it.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#144

Post by dustinmoris »

I am in my early 30s and I also had COVID-19.

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

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#145

Post by richrichardsson »

dustinmoris wrote: post #144

I am in my early 30s and I also had COVID-19. 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 al…

> 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

This is the kind of shit I expect from Facebook comments, I'm frankly flabbergasted to see someone making that kind of stupid assertion here.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#146

Post by Kaiyou »

tly_alex wrote: post #105
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. has about 600k cases. One order of magnitude more is 6M cases. That's still very far from broadly spreading. It's worrying about the viability of the herd immunity theory (too few people had it), and opening the country soon (a few weeks of exponential case increases would overload hospital capacity, even after stemming the case growth through sheltering-- putting us back to square one). It feels, 1-2 months…

6M cases are still far from broadly spreading, am I reading this right?

At what percentage would you speak of broadly? 6M cases are 1.5%.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#147

Post by dustinmoris »

richrichardsson wrote: post #145
dustinmoris wrote: post #144

I am in my early 30s and I also had COVID-19. 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 al…

> 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 This is the kind of shit I expect from Facebook comments, I'm frankly flabbergasted to see someone making that kind of stupid assertion here.

It is true though. Where we live 70% of the COVID-19 patients which are currently in intensive care are very overweight men. Just being fat itself puts a huge strain on your health, you're more likely to get a lot of illnesses with age and a lot of these patients probably should be taking already medication in order to prevent a heart attack or other issues coming up and the only reason why some of them are currently "without an existing health condition" is because they didn't go to their GP yet who took some blood samples and decided that they are a risk group who should start making some lifestyle changes.

Like it or not, but I'm not going to sugar coat the reality of the situation because I might hurt some obese person's feelings.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#148

Post by juanre »

I am going through pretty much an identical situation, except that a doctor prescribed antibiotics over the phone (assuming that the chest pressure and shortness of breath are due to the bacterial secondary infection) and I seem to be getting better.

The uncertainty has been eased by a little gizmo to measure the oxygen saturation in blood, which I got on amazon for £75 as soon as it was obvious that I could not breath well. I am probably fine as long as the saturation is > 92% or so.

Of course I have doubts about the reliability of a medical device off amazon, but it seems well done and, interestingly, it gives my mind a piece of seemingly objective truth to latch on.

[Edit - saturation level that will make me go to the hospital]

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#149

Post by Upvoter33 »

dustinmoris wrote: post #144

I am in my early 30s and I also had COVID-19. 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 al…

Thanks for sharing, and glad you are well. However, you can't possibly know this to be definitively true: "People with a pre-existing health condition who don't know about it yet because no doctor has diagnosed it yet". It could be that some people just aren't as good as fighting it off, perhaps because they hadn't had the "right" set of previous illnesses, or who knows what else, that can lead to fatality. I don't think we know enough to make such bold claims.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#150

Post by wastedhours »

Barrin92 wrote: post #42

I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about the psychological nature of this pandemic. The author of the article is 39 years old, I'm quite surprised by the severity of the experience that he reports. There was a similar article in the NYT recently by a woman whose husband contracted COVID, had a relatively 'normal' pneumonia, but the article read like a war report out of an Ebola zone, allusions to C…

> I wonder if it's, in particular, a phenomenon of affluent societies that haven't had to deal with serious stressors in a long time.

Most likely it is, and I'd much rather live with occasionally being scared shitless by a global pandemic that might not be as bad as we feel it is than to deal with continual serious stressors day-in day-out.

> cultural response here worries me a lot

Why? I get that resilience is an important trait in a number of walks of life, but being concerned about a quite-deadly airborne respiratory virus that could be transferred by any Tom, Dick or Harry within close proximity seems like quite a valid thing to let get on top of you.

There's also the sense of unknown about this all.

Dying by cancer is, unless it's especially niche, quite well documented. And though you wont be around to rationalise it, being killed by a bomb is also a well understood process too.

Being killed by something that someone might just exhale into your general direction, that has no documented cure, isn't that well understood by most of the population any more (and damn well shouldn't have to be).

"It is what it is" is a great way to build mental resilience in trying times, but when you can't really identify what "it" actually "is", it becomes a lot harder.

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