I was sick in the second half of February with the worst "cold" in 10 years, if not my whole life. And so were a lot of other people that I DIDN'T HAVE CONTACT WITH. It was strange to hear of people in other states recovering at roughly the same time from a similar condition.
It began with a coughing fit and body aches. I guess they weren't that bad because I didn't take pain relievers.
Then there was the sore throat that lasted a long time. It was after 2 days with no improvement that I saw the doctor. Also had some ear congestion. The doctor said it's not strep and I didn't have a fever when I was checked. The was little discussion about what kind of virus it might be. Although it is unlikely that the treatment would have been any different. If I had a fever it lasted only 1-2 days. I couldn't find the thermometer and was in no mood to look for it.
Later I developed conjunctivitis and was coughing up phlegm. It didn't smell bad, but thinking back it's likely I couldn't smell anything. Maybe it was coincidence but I think antibiotics helped with these last symptoms. Perhaps some of it was a coinfection while the virus weakened or distracted the immune system.
Feeling good now, but still have a lingering cough. I hear a lot of people with a similar cough and I don't think that they were as sick. Slightly odd as I'm early 30s with no conditions that would make me high risk. I was not tested as this happened in February. At this point I'd need the antibody test to get any useful info.
Yeah potatohead I seem to be on the mend, though the joint pain still comes and goes. It was really frightening for a few days because my mother had to have both hips and both knees replaced, and I'd never had that kind of pain before. I did have gout before I got my pre-diabetes under control ~15 years ago and this was comparable, which is saying a lot.
Yeah, I have not been the same since. I has some minor joint issues, mainly one knee I worked over real good while in the military in my 20's. I have not returned to baseline, though it seems better every day.
I slept in a chair a couple of nights for breathing, and hip pain.
And yeah, now is not the time to need the ER. Be careful everyone.
You can hear all the news reports in the world and still not be gripped by the immediacy and severity of COVID-19 without reading an account like potatohead's. Thanks for providing us with such intimate details, patatacabeza. (No tl;dr called for here! ) Scary stuff! And I'm glad you and yours are on the mend at last!
IPA oh, ok. Note from healthcare oriented pre-chem long way back: Don't use bigher than 70% concentration. Will actually cause a virus to "encapsulate" itself, so you haven'tkilled it. Can't remeber the why 25 years later. Mention this as you can probably find the 99% strength of this stuff still from industrial supply houses.
Oh my, thank you for your cautionary tale. I hope your recovery will be complete, and soon.
My wife talks to her sister in Northern Italy almost every day, and from the beginning we have heard from her the alarm bells. We were were still living in the past where we thought we could take a vacation by air to hike in the Grand Canyon. We couldn't imagine, even less than a month ago, that the Grand Canyon would be shuttered.
I know of only one of our close friends who had the symptoms, to a degree, including the loss of smell and appetite. She was miserable, not to the degree you've described. She couldn't get tested, and she was not counted among the cases. Luckily we didn't have direct contact with her near that time.
Our area issued shelter-in-place orders just before St. Patrick's day. No green beer this year. This is an insidious virus for sure.
By the way, water is highly polar, so does not attack fats. Alcohol on the other hand is both polar and non-polar, and the nonpolar side disrupts the lipid envelope of the virus, while the polar part dissolves in water. Same for soap. Very effective to disrupt the envelope and wash it away.
Ah, thanks for the chem info. Appreciated. I am very much a student right now. So much to learn. (I have professional reasons to keep learning about chem right now)
This virus is literally in a little lipid ball. Fat, with deadly inside! If I had a do over, I would deffo go for micro biology. It is amazing to me now that our electromechanical acumen has brought us tools to go deeper.
You can hear all the news reports in the world and still not be gripped by the immediacy and severity of COVID-19 without reading an account like potatohead's. Thanks for providing us with such intimate details, patatacabeza. (No tl;dr called for here! ) Scary stuff! And I'm glad you and yours are on the mend at last!
-Phil
You are quite welcome. For once my love of words is a bonus!
Here, laugh and smile a little:
I am so glad people like that guy exist.
And then contemplate our reality for a time. This piece written in csound. It is one of the very best pieces of electronic music I have ever heard.
WOW, that's a terrible tale, potatohead. Glad the worst is over for you. Wishing you and the family a complete and speedy recovery.
My family is still healthy, but the worst days are supposedly ahead here in Los Angeles. I must have gotten lucky in my travels, I flew LAX to JFK on Feb 20 and returned Feb 25. Jets & airports are havens for a virus like this.
I was attending the New York Toy Fair at the Javits Convention center, which is now a makeshift hospital for Covid patients. What a difference a month makes.
Potatohead, I'm not saying that you didn't have COVID-19, but based on the time frame it seems more likely that you had some form of the flu. The last flight you took was around February 20, and there were only 15 reported cases in the U.S. at that time. Even by the end of February there were only 68 reported cases. Of course there wasn't much testing at that time, but even if 99% of the active infections weren't reported that would still be less than 7000 people in the U.S. at the end of February. Out of a country of 330 Million that's only 0.002 percent of the population.
The CDC reported on February 4 that there were 19 Million cases of the flu during the current flu season, with 10,000 deaths. 19 Million is more than 5% of the population of the U.S. Of course, there weren't that many contagious people at the end of February, but the probability of catching the flu at that time was still probably a couple of orders of magnitude more likely than COVID-19.
That's all changed, and the probability of catching COVID-19 is much higher now. And of course, it is much more deadly than the Flu. The only way to know for sure what you had is to get tested. Hopefully, testing will ramp up to the point where we really know how many people had, or have the virus.
Wow, potatohead, your cautionary tale was definitely not tl;dr! Was in same terminal two days ago to meet an incoming charter flight from Fiji. But things have changed dramatically since Feb. We were told it would be a class B misdemeanor to deviate from the assigned path. And the YL we picked up has to be quarantined for two weeks.
Light bulb goes on: One is only as safe as his stupidest move. Doesn't matter what I do 95% of the time if the other 5% is irresponsible.
Dave Hein, you have to look not just at the total number of reported cases but where potatohead was flying through. The first evacuation flights from Wuhan landed in SoCal in early February and the passengers were not quarantined. The timeline is actually almost perfect for a handfull index cases from those flights to have infected the entire country on the currently running timeline, and for potatohead to have been in the path of the infection when it was taking off in SoCal as those people returned home or went on about their business. There was no testing at all of anybody then so we don't know how many carriers there might have been or where they might have gone. By the time we had any numbers at all it was really bad, and both potatohead and my coworker had been in likely exposure situations.
My only real hesitation boils down to my exposure time and risk in LAX did include CoV19. Some parts of the US did report cases, and I was in one of those parts for a few days, and among people who were exposed themselves. At least one had a positive test. I did not yet get to ask all the people about it in a timely enough way.
I see @localroger already said as much. I was in prime spot for a considerable time and interactions, and unaware of the real danger, also unaware of the poor testing metrics.
That said, yes. There is a particularly ugly FLU here too.
Many symptoms overlap. Loss of smell is a big one and my wife got that to a high degree. Never before has that been a symptom. And she was home throughout. What she got was from me. (As I am reminded from time to time right now, lol)
I won't know for sure until I can get an antibody test. Annoying.
For now, I am going to operate on the worst case, which is flu, and us being higher risk because of it. Safest path forward.
My gut says I had it as others who got confirmed share many experiences.
We really botched early testing and response. Total bummer.
Also I have had both influenza and West Nile (that one put me to sleep for 36 hours straight, hello encephalitis) and have never felt anything quite the same as this joint pain symptom. And like the loss of smell some people experience it seems to be a particular calling card of this virus.
I've been pushing Tonic Water on my family for the past 2+ weeks as a low-level source of Quinine.
US TW has approx. 20-30/mg Quinine per 12 oz serving. So 1L TW is is ~60-90mg Quinine.
Got 2 sisters and a wife working in Hospitals, and an 82 y.o. Mom with COPD and so far none have become infected.
No way of knowing if they've actually been exposed, however with the rapid tests being delivered around the country I expect we'll know for sure soon.
Quinine in Malaria patients is ~325 mg, so I would think even 1L of TW might have some actual prophylactic affect, and 2L would be even better.
Big caution is one has heart issues as mentioned here: https://www.cardiosmart.org/Healthwise/d003/66/d00366
Also, Ivermectin an anti-parasitical seems like a strong contender per Monash Univ. OZ, though that was in vitro.
Look for in vivo very soon hopefully, although Ivermectin is already FDA approved.
Ah, thanks for the chem info. Appreciated. I am very much a student right now. So much to learn. (I have professional reasons to keep learning about chem right now)
This virus is literally in a little lipid ball. Fat, with deadly inside! If I had a do over, I would deffo go for micro biology. It is amazing to me now that our electromechanical acumen has brought us tools to go deeper.
Indeed, never before have we had the technology to sequence DNA and RNA to the depth we have today, to guide the development of vaccines and treatments and to track the spread of the disease.
SARS-COV2 is a single strand RNA virus with just under 30000 bases, the four letters uagc (uracil, adenine, guanine and cytosine). That is huge as viruses go, but tiny in comparison us humans, say we compare a BASIC Stamp 1 to a Propeller 2. It programs for proteins, sometimes tricky, like different entry points into the same code segment to perform different functions. The diagram attached (from https://nextstrain.org/ncov, scroll down, 3rd graph) shows the complete virus, from base 0 to base ~30k. The segments of the program memory map. The web page is interactive, and I've moved the pointers to highlight the segments ORF3a, M, E and ORF6. An informative article in NYT Science describes ORF3a as the "escape artist" protein, "The ORF3a protein pokes a hole in the membrane of an infected cell, making it easier for new viruses to escape. It also triggers inflammation, one of the most dangerous symptoms of Covid-19." The segments M and E code for proteins that stabilize the lipid fat envelope of the virus. ORF6, "blocks signals that the infected cell would send out to the immune system. It also blocks some of the cell’s own virus-fighting proteins, the same ones targeted by other viruses such as polio and influenza." And so on, fascinating and deadly.
As a single strand of RNA, a coronavirus is subject to transcription errors, mutations, more so than double stranded DNA. Hundreds of labs are sequencing the viral genome, a world wide effort, and the mutations are being tracked as COVID-19 moves around the world. In the graph, the diversity line shows base locations where mutations have been detected in comparison with the original Wuhan sample. By and large the mutations are minor and don't affect the health outcome at all (which of course remains a question), but the mutations allow the spread of the virus around the world to be tracked. Just like sending a sample of DNA to 23andME, where one can find out about where their ancestors came from and where to find close living relatives, the https://nextstrain.org/ncov site has interactive graphs and maps that show the points in time and location where different clades (strains with a common ancestor) originate and subsequently pop up elsewhere.
Other vaccines and antibiotics have no effect. There is no vaccine or treatment for the novel coronavirus. Your only hope is to either not catch it by practicing social distancing, or hope your immune system is both strong enough to fight it off and not crazy enough to kill you while doing so (which, as with the flu, seems to account for some of the most severe reactions).
@"Tracy Allen"
Thanks for the info. Now off to dive into the links!
The world has never been in such a position to understand this virus, and to work together.
Hopefully those brilliant minds will get us either a treatment or a vaccination, or better still, both - and the sooner the better!
Comments
It began with a coughing fit and body aches. I guess they weren't that bad because I didn't take pain relievers.
Then there was the sore throat that lasted a long time. It was after 2 days with no improvement that I saw the doctor. Also had some ear congestion. The doctor said it's not strep and I didn't have a fever when I was checked. The was little discussion about what kind of virus it might be. Although it is unlikely that the treatment would have been any different. If I had a fever it lasted only 1-2 days. I couldn't find the thermometer and was in no mood to look for it.
Later I developed conjunctivitis and was coughing up phlegm. It didn't smell bad, but thinking back it's likely I couldn't smell anything. Maybe it was coincidence but I think antibiotics helped with these last symptoms. Perhaps some of it was a coinfection while the virus weakened or distracted the immune system.
Feeling good now, but still have a lingering cough. I hear a lot of people with a similar cough and I don't think that they were as sick. Slightly odd as I'm early 30s with no conditions that would make me high risk. I was not tested as this happened in February. At this point I'd need the antibody test to get any useful info.
I slept in a chair a couple of nights for breathing, and hip pain.
And yeah, now is not the time to need the ER. Be careful everyone.
-Phil
My wife talks to her sister in Northern Italy almost every day, and from the beginning we have heard from her the alarm bells. We were were still living in the past where we thought we could take a vacation by air to hike in the Grand Canyon. We couldn't imagine, even less than a month ago, that the Grand Canyon would be shuttered.
I know of only one of our close friends who had the symptoms, to a degree, including the loss of smell and appetite. She was miserable, not to the degree you've described. She couldn't get tested, and she was not counted among the cases. Luckily we didn't have direct contact with her near that time.
Our area issued shelter-in-place orders just before St. Patrick's day. No green beer this year. This is an insidious virus for sure.
By the way, water is highly polar, so does not attack fats. Alcohol on the other hand is both polar and non-polar, and the nonpolar side disrupts the lipid envelope of the virus, while the polar part dissolves in water. Same for soap. Very effective to disrupt the envelope and wash it away.
This virus is literally in a little lipid ball. Fat, with deadly inside! If I had a do over, I would deffo go for micro biology. It is amazing to me now that our electromechanical acumen has brought us tools to go deeper.
You are quite welcome. For once my love of words is a bonus!
Here, laugh and smile a little:
I am so glad people like that guy exist.
And then contemplate our reality for a time. This piece written in csound. It is one of the very best pieces of electronic music I have ever heard.
My family is still healthy, but the worst days are supposedly ahead here in Los Angeles. I must have gotten lucky in my travels, I flew LAX to JFK on Feb 20 and returned Feb 25. Jets & airports are havens for a virus like this.
I was attending the New York Toy Fair at the Javits Convention center, which is now a makeshift hospital for Covid patients. What a difference a month makes.
Everybody take care and wash those hands!
Good for you, and thanks! We are getting there.
The CDC reported on February 4 that there were 19 Million cases of the flu during the current flu season, with 10,000 deaths. 19 Million is more than 5% of the population of the U.S. Of course, there weren't that many contagious people at the end of February, but the probability of catching the flu at that time was still probably a couple of orders of magnitude more likely than COVID-19.
That's all changed, and the probability of catching COVID-19 is much higher now. And of course, it is much more deadly than the Flu. The only way to know for sure what you had is to get tested. Hopefully, testing will ramp up to the point where we really know how many people had, or have the virus.
Light bulb goes on: One is only as safe as his stupidest move. Doesn't matter what I do 95% of the time if the other 5% is irresponsible.
My only real hesitation boils down to my exposure time and risk in LAX did include CoV19. Some parts of the US did report cases, and I was in one of those parts for a few days, and among people who were exposed themselves. At least one had a positive test. I did not yet get to ask all the people about it in a timely enough way.
I see @localroger already said as much. I was in prime spot for a considerable time and interactions, and unaware of the real danger, also unaware of the poor testing metrics.
That said, yes. There is a particularly ugly FLU here too.
Many symptoms overlap. Loss of smell is a big one and my wife got that to a high degree. Never before has that been a symptom. And she was home throughout. What she got was from me. (As I am reminded from time to time right now, lol)
I won't know for sure until I can get an antibody test. Annoying.
For now, I am going to operate on the worst case, which is flu, and us being higher risk because of it. Safest path forward.
My gut says I had it as others who got confirmed share many experiences.
We really botched early testing and response. Total bummer.
-Phil
Indeed
US TW has approx. 20-30/mg Quinine per 12 oz serving. So 1L TW is is ~60-90mg Quinine.
Got 2 sisters and a wife working in Hospitals, and an 82 y.o. Mom with COPD and so far none have become infected.
No way of knowing if they've actually been exposed, however with the rapid tests being delivered around the country I expect we'll know for sure soon.
Quinine in Malaria patients is ~325 mg, so I would think even 1L of TW might have some actual prophylactic affect, and 2L would be even better.
Big caution is one has heart issues as mentioned here: https://www.cardiosmart.org/Healthwise/d003/66/d00366
Also, Ivermectin an anti-parasitical seems like a strong contender per Monash Univ. OZ, though that was in vitro.
Look for in vivo very soon hopefully, although Ivermectin is already FDA approved.
Indeed, never before have we had the technology to sequence DNA and RNA to the depth we have today, to guide the development of vaccines and treatments and to track the spread of the disease.
SARS-COV2 is a single strand RNA virus with just under 30000 bases, the four letters uagc (uracil, adenine, guanine and cytosine). That is huge as viruses go, but tiny in comparison us humans, say we compare a BASIC Stamp 1 to a Propeller 2.
As a single strand of RNA, a coronavirus is subject to transcription errors, mutations, more so than double stranded DNA. Hundreds of labs are sequencing the viral genome, a world wide effort, and the mutations are being tracked as COVID-19 moves around the world. In the graph, the diversity line shows base locations where mutations have been detected in comparison with the original Wuhan sample. By and large the mutations are minor and don't affect the health outcome at all (which of course remains a question), but the mutations allow the spread of the virus around the world to be tracked. Just like sending a sample of DNA to 23andME, where one can find out about where their ancestors came from and where to find close living relatives, the https://nextstrain.org/ncov site has interactive graphs and maps that show the points in time and location where different clades (strains with a common ancestor) originate and subsequently pop up elsewhere.
I'd much rather imagine it that experience it.
Glad you pulled through. I'll be extra careful after reading this...
I taught myself to sew last Friday been making Fu masks all week and shipping out to family, friends and coworkers...
No prop2 progress this week
Completely different virus...
Thanks for the info. Now off to dive into the links!
The world has never been in such a position to understand this virus, and to work together.
Hopefully those brilliant minds will get us either a treatment or a vaccination, or better still, both - and the sooner the better!