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My Covid Adventure
In early December, I got Covid – the Wuhan Flu, ChiCom Fever. This is the disease that has California and New York locked down. The one that has us cowering in fear. (That’s not a joke. I have several otherwise-sane friends, who are locking themselves in the house, venturing out only when they have to. Two are MENSA members.)
What was it like? Are you ready?
It was like having a chest cold. Not even a severe chest cold – a mild chest cold. That was it.
I am 65 years old. I have controlled hypertension. I am 75 to 85 pounds overweight, depending on how you define my ideal weight. I have allergies that affect my respiratory system. I get occasional asthma. All co-morbidities. It was a mild chest cold.
Do you want to see me at my worst during the disease? (Or pretty close to it?) Look at David March’s podcast The Historians Give their Two Cents. That’s me on the left. I was well into it then.
I had a mild sore throat for the first couple of days. Then a little bit of chest congestion – a very little bit. I was a little more tired than usual, but that was due to insomnia rather than Covid. (Mainly due to worry and frustration. I sleep poorly if I let myself get wound up.)
The day job is as a tech writer. I am also a freelance author, and I have another part-time consulting gig I do a couple of hours a day. I had just started a new short-term tech writing gig that runs through mid-January and I have a book on deadline. (I always have a book on deadline.) So I worked 10- to 14-hour days throughout the period I had Covid. I had no trouble working those hours. It was all work from home so I did not have to go anywhere. Just sit at my computer and write.
I cannot write if my mind is foggy due to illness. I was writing at least 10 hours each day. I had no problem banging out words on my book and no problem working 8 hours Monday through Friday doing some finicky editing of a complex technical document. Covid was no more than an inconvenience. (In some ways it was a benefit because I was forced to stay home and work.)
I know I had Covid. An adult nephew, who lives in my house, got it. He had just started a new job. He thinks he may have picked it up at the clinic where he had to go for his pre-job physical (or possibly at his workplace). He lost his sense of taste and smell on December 7, so he got tested. His results came back positive. Three days later, I developed a mild sore throat. (You know how your throat feels the day after you go to an exciting football game and spend most of it loudly cheering on your team? It felt like that.) So I got tested.
I have a certificate that says I tested positive for Covid. The County Health Department called me to tell me not to leave the house for ten days following my first symptom. So, yeah, I had it.
My nephew had a worse case than I did. He is in his twenties. He says his case was equivalent to a mild case of the flu. I had loose stools; he had full-on diarrhea. His case lasted about ten days. I had symptoms last six, maybe seven days. His case was much milder than the norovirus he contracted two years earlier.
Why was I stressed out and losing sleep? Because I had Covid. Because relatives were afraid I was going to be very ill and half my friends seemed to be measuring me for my coffin. My nephew was behaving as if he had given me the Black Death and was guilt-tripping over potentially having given me a fatal disease.
I was worried. I had been told it was a very serious disease for people my age and with my health conditions. I kept waiting for it to get worse. Even though it was not severe, I had been warned since March it had the potential to very suddenly turn very, very bad.
It never got worse. The mountain gave birth to a mouse.
So here is a question: was I lucky or typical?
If I was lucky it is the first time in my life. Luck never breaks my way. Plus there was my nephew’s mild experience. A son got it last December (2019), and had the same symptoms as my nephew, except it was more like full-blown, but typical flu. In November a niece got it, as did her husband, child, mother, and stepfather. Everyone except her mother got cases that were mild to medium. Her mother had a more severe case, requiring a trip to the ER and being released later that day. Ricochet’s Doctor Robert wrote about his experience. It was not that bad.
If my nephew had not lost his sense of taste and smell he would not have gotten tested. He thought what he had was allergies. If he had not tested positive I would not have gotten tested, and never realized I had the dread killer Covid.
I suspect I am more typical than lucky. Those who get mild cases often do not get recorded. Even if they do, those cases never headline the news articles about Covid, the only add to the shrieking case count numbers.
Yes, we may have had 300,000 Covid deaths. That is still less than one-tenth of one percent of the US population. More, overall morbidity with Covid is less than 1 percent for those that get it. The deaths are clustered in the elderly (over half of those who died from it are over 75) and the infirm (the vast majority of those under 75 who have died of it had life-threatening health conditions.)
I’d like to expand on the chest cold theme I raised earlier. People die from chest colds. The elderly and infirm contract chest colds which develop into pneumonia, and then they die from pneumonia. The profile of those who die from chest colds seems pretty similar to those that die from Covid, it seems to me.
What if Covid is the functional equivalent of a chest cold? What if its behavior is highly similar? Covid mutates. So do colds. Both are viruses. Both spread the same way. Neither Covid nor colds have high mortality rates. Do you know what is more likely to kill you than Covid if you are under 50? Going to work each day if you are a logger, a professional fisherman, an oilfield worker, or a long-haul trucker.
We have been trying to find a cure for the common cold for at least 150 years, including attempting to develop a vaccination. We have not succeeded so far. What if we are as successful in finding a way to control Covid? Would that be surprising?
Do we remain in hiding and locked down if that happens? Can we? If we lock down for Covid shouldn’t we lockdown during the cold season? The two seem very little different if you ignore the names given to each disease. The lockdowns, social distancing, and masks appear to be taking a greater toll than Covid.
I really believe a lot of the fear about Covid boils down to superstition. Some examples:
I have had Covid. I recovered from it. According to what we know about the disease, once you have had it you cannot catch it and cannot pass it on.
Do I need to wear a mask? According to my county health department I do. Why? They said it was so I will not pass on to others a disease that I already have had and cannot pass on and so that I will not catch a disease I already had and cannot catch from others. Because Science!
Do I need to get vaccinated? According to my county health department I do. Why? They said it was so the vaccination will train my immune system to resist a disease my immune system resisted before getting immunized. Because Science!
That is not science. It is superstition. It is endowing science with magical powers. Superstition is defined as excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings. We are treating Covid, masks, and immunization as supernatural beings, with powers beyond natural forces.
Immunizations train your immune system to resist a disease. So does getting the disease and recovering from it. The immunization is intended to substitute for getting the disease. If getting the disease and recovering from it doesn’t make you immune an immunization won’t. All an immunization does is trick your immune system into believing you had the disease. You endow a vaccine with magical power if you believe otherwise.
Throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder will be as effective in preventing a reoccurrence of Covid as getting an immunization from a vaccine developed before you got Covid. You already have an immunization for a version of Covid more recent than that for which the immunization protects you. The vaccine is protecting you from an earlier strain of the virus. It is the same reason this year’s flu shot protects you from last year’s flu and not this year’s. It was developed from the previous year’s strain.
I am not against vaccination. I have favorably reviewed books arguing against avoiding vaccination. I was planning to get immunized before I got Covid. However, someone needs to give me a scientific, rather than a faith-based reason, for me to get the current Covid immunization. Explain how it is supposed to provide better protection than my own immune system has already provided.
Moreover – at least for me – Covid wasn’t a serious disease. It did not endanger my health any more than the colds I have suffered previously. Why should I even worry about a reoccurrence of a strain for which the current vaccine protects me from?
We need to stop treating this disease with superstitious dread. Or it will kill us all. It will scare us to death. And we will deserve to die.
Published in General
Correct me if I’m wrong, but those numbers would mean this virus is about 10 times as deadly as a typical flu season, “only” twice as deadly as the worst flu seasons in US history. It’s extraordinarily bad. It’s not a plague.
By plague, I mean a disease which wrecks a society despite defensive measures (rather than because of them).
Last week I had to take a COVID test because I had surgery scheduled for Monday. Just got a call to say that my test came back positive, and so surgery will have to be rescheduled.
What are my symptoms?
I have a slightly runny nose and a tiny bit of nasal congestion.
I had a bit of a headache last week. I coughed a couple times.
That’s it. I assumed it was just a slight cold at the time, and I already feel like I’m over it.
Anyway, I am now a statistic.
Don’t forget to continue to wear a mask and social distance. You might get Covid otherwise. Oh, wait!
I think my wife has it, too. I think she had it first, then gave it to me. She’s been a little congested, too. Whatever. Our house is too small for anyone to isolate within it. So let’s assume the kids have it, too.
That’s how most of the cases get transmitted – at home between family members. That’s why we have to shut down churches, restaurants, gyms, bars, and small sole-proprietor businesses. So people get an opportunity to spend more time with their loved ones (or at least their families) at home because there is no where else to be. (Except big-box stores and riots. Those are totally okay.)
I think Doc Kozak meant this as general advice, not for you in particular. As a fellow wuflu survivor, I’m willing to put up with small poppycock. But we have to open the worLd back up. I think this was all about dumping Trump, but what do I know?
In my opinion, at our age we should not have to put up with small poppycock.
The advice Kozak gave is virtually word for word what someone at the Galveston County Health Department told me when they called me to let me know what I was supposed to do after quarantine ended: social distance, wear masks, and get vaccinated. I asked her the same questions I asked in my comment. The answers I received boiled down to do it because Science! When I asked what science supported my doing it, I was told, “well, you never know.” That’s not science. That’s superstition.
You have a probably temporary pass.
I’m talking to the rest of the folks out there.
PS. I’d still get vaccinated because if you had a mild case your immunity will probably wane fairly quickly.
And the vaccine is not temporary; we now this how?
My response to that at this stage would be, “Get back to me when you know.”
Early in the pandemic there may have been an excuse for acting on the basis of such unknowns. What we know now is that sars-cov-2 is another respiratory virus. It’s not exactly the same as other respiratory viruses, but it’s not from a completely different world. What we know about respiratory viruses in general does apply to this one.
Actually, that’s one of the things we don’t know. We’re getting some better guesses as time goes on (see the first part of this MedCram video: COVID 19 Vaccine Deep Dive: Safety, Immunity, RNA Production, w Shane Crotty, PhD (Pfizer / Moderna). The possibility of longer-term immunity is starting to look good, but we won’t know until the longer term comes just how long the immunity will tend to be effective.
I expect it will be like the annual flu shot.
I don’t them either. I use immune system enhancers. They work fine.
The three worst flu death years for the US were the 1918 pandemic with 675k deaths ( that was over 18 months we’re at 10 months so unless something changes we may catch them) , 1957 with 115k deaths and 1967 with 100k deaths.
Flu seasons for the last decade have ranged from a low 12k 2011-2012 to a high of 2017-2018. Avg of 35.9k deaths.
So this means we have to get the vaccine every freaking year? That translates to masks forever.
You might have had some protective factor your nephew didn’t have. I think a lot has been made abut age, but let’s face it – even among the elderly, half the deaths were those of people in nursing homes.
Back in March, I felt out of it, and lost my sense of taste for a few days. Not just taste, but even food texture too.
I didn’t think much about it except that around the beginning of April, I noticed the news media was saying that a profound loss of taste was a symptom.
So it could be that I have had it. I have a mild seizure disorder, and take two baby aspirin a day and sometimes Benadryl when hayfever acts up. I’m 20 pounds over weight, but physically active. I’m in decent shape for someone pushing 70.
Also, it is stated all over the news in the Far East that if you have had a SARS-like illness, you either won’t get COVID 19 or will have a mild case. We both had a terrible respiratory flu back in September of 2018. Our lungs had not had much clean air that summer, as fires raged both West, and North of us sine July 15th or so.
Neither of us get sick often, but that gunky respiratory flu was something we couldn’t shake off for four full weeks. Perhaps that is why we have stayed healthy throughout this “pandemic.”
The most I’ve actually felt unnerved locally was the 2011-12 winter. I was out in California for New Year’s and about a week after I came back males in my age group started dropping dead or barely surviving a viral strain that hit here in West Texas, but apparently was no big deal in other parts of the country. I personally knew three people who died and one who spent a week in the hospital in critical condition, and when I talked with the CEO of the local hospital, he said for whatever reason this virus (which he said appeared to be an offshoot of the 2009-10 H1N1 strain) was most deadly to men between the ages of 50 and 60.
So you never know when there’s going to be a virus out there which targets your demographics the best, and, at least in the case of nine years ago, pretty much leaves everyone else alone.
I agree. But China did something awful, so we all had to copy them. Cause.
Hard to say, and don’t be too confident that you know the answer. I certainly don’t know the answer. These are the first memory RNA vaccines ever used. Memory RNA vaccines stimulate the body’s immune system through a process that is different from how the virus itself would stimulate the immune system. It may last longer, or shorter. It may be more effective, or less effective. We just don’t know, because we have no experience with the use of this technology. We also don’t know whether this vaccine will induce an immune response at the T cell level as well as the antibody level. There are plenty of pathogens as to which the body’s natural immune response is not long-lasting (TB, HIV, Malaria, and Hep C, for example). That’s why it may turn out to be necessary to have periodic vaccinations, to maintain actual immunity. And that’s why it may turn out that your bout with COVID has not bestowed upon you the lasting immunity for which you would hope.
All that said, I’m glad to you are well and I hope you stay that way. Happy holidays.
Back in August I invited some people to an event. Hardly anyone showed up. One person was probably quite similar — about 65 years old and maybe even more overweight. He said he already had had the virus and survived as he thought it was no big deal. However, his relative who was maybe older with perhaps some medical problems sort of refused to go to the doctor and didn’t make it.
Last month, I was at lake area sort of on the edge of the Ozarks. I talked to a guy at a house. Apparently a lot of the people who live in this community are older. I never thought about that. The person starts telling me that the person who lived in this neighboring house died, one of the people who lived in this neighboring house died, etc., etc.
If it had gotten bad, I would have seen my doctor. I had a few e-mail consultations with her prior to getting tested, but never went in because it was such a mild case I was largely over it by the time the test results came it. And the doctor told me to do what I was already doing: getting a lot of zinc, vitamin C and vitamin D. (The zinc might have been the difference between my nephew’s case and mine. He too was taking vitamin C and D, but not zinc. I am in the habit of taking those zinc cold treatment tablet in the morning and evening when I get sniffles because I have found they help clear up nasal congestion.)
I haven’t been doing zinc. But C and D daily for several years.
I was looking for zinc last weekend, but I could only find it in a combo with Magnesium and Calcium. I already take Magnesium.
And then again, I might not get a temporary pass. Only way to find out is to let time pass.
I am not going to worry about it. I was assured the disease would be serious before I got it. Having experienced it once, I expect it to be every bit as serious the next time as it was the first time.
Yeahbut, he just had it this month, so I’d think he’d be good for now.
This paper says the half-life of t-cells that are produced in response to a Sars-CoV-2 infection is 3-5 months: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.15.383323v1
So if I were in his shoes, I’d want to save my turn for a vaccination for later — maybe go to the end of the line.
What he said.
@kozak, copy all. Now…
Filter for people over 75 years of age. Then
Filter for people with comorbidities. Then
Filter for geriatric people with comorbidities. Then
Throw in a filter (how extensive is hard to guesstimate) for all of those listed as dying of COVID because they died with COVID. Dr. Birx, she of Thanksgiving Day house winterizations, admitted that that was the CDC standard. Plus, I’ve seen too many reports, here in FL, of people who died in motorcycle accidents or of GSWs being listed as COVID deaths.
So, sorry for thinking this is a tempest in a teacup.
I’m 57, drug controlled bp, 30 lbs overweight, and had it Thanksgiving. My symptoms were quite a bit like the writer’s. I think I had more fatigue than he described, very mild chest cough, though no sore throat and no fever. Lost my sense of taste/smell. That, and my girlfriend prodding, caused me to get tested and it came back positive. I’m giving blood for plasma New Year’s eve so I’ll be a very cheap drunk that evening.
Nearly every cause of death disproportionately affects people in those categories. Also, we all eventually enter one of those categories.
We found out on Christmas Eve that a family friend is on a ventilator and may well not make it. He is probably late 60’s and has pretty bad diabetes. And yet, despite those obvious co-morbitities, his wife and kids and grandkids are devastated. That’s weird. Someone should tell them this all a tempest in a teacup.
Okay, ready? Here we go: It’s a tempest in a teacup.
I’m not saying that there should be no protections or security precautions in place. I’ve written more than a couple of stand-alone posts saying that.
Was your poor friend well-served by a societal lockdown, and the universal mitigation measures put in place? Would he have been better served if we had placed our efforts, resources and time protecting those, like him, who are squarely in vulnerable populations? It’s unknowable, but my money is on the latter.
Know what? We all eventually die, too. I’ve got (depending on whose definitions you use) more’n a couple comorbidities. That’s okay. I’m responsible for me. Not the teenager down the street, whose educational development is hoist on video learning. Not the college kid, also on video learning but still paying full freight on her tuition. Me.
Boss, I just don’t understand that comment. You got a lot of “likes” for it, but I’m lost. Are you saying that we have to choose between, on the one hand, acknowledging that this is a serious disease or, on the other hand, saying that lockdowns are horrible, that the public policy response to the disease has been horrible, and that individuals (rather than politicians and bureaucrats) are properly responsible for their own health and safety? Because I believe both of those things, and I’m not prepared to make that choice. I hate this disease just as much as I hate the bullying and lying bureaucrats who have used it as an excuse to assume the mantle of tin pot tyrants, and the mewling cowards who are anxious to turn their lives and liberty over to those selfsame tin pot tyrants.
This disease is not a “tempest in a teapot” and it is not an excuse for any of the atrocities that have been carried out in the name of protecting us from the disease either. If we are responsible adults then we should be able to recognize a serious problem without donning a hazmat suit, hiding under our beds, and waiting for politicians and bureaucrats to save us.