- pandemic in progress: check
- risky lifestyle: check (as in very frequent air travel for work)
- symptoms: O2 level drop, fluid in lungs, persistent cough, extreme tiredness, dizzyness, loss of smell/taste check all of these, and the rest, fortunately not. Later on: crazy beating heart for no particular reason, losing weight steadily but more slowly now.
Decision not to test was made by qualified medic, who said that they needed the tests for those cases where there was some degree of doubt, which in my case there really wasn't, besides that there was an extreme shortage of tests at that time. And to call an ambulance straight away, and not my house doctor in case things got worse than they were at that moment.
Keep in mind that there are vast numbers of people that have gotten COVID that did not get tested and that therefore do not show up in the various statistics. Especially in the beginning the health care system was totally overwhelmed and care went to those who needed it most, and either wasn't administered to those who might have benefited from it and many who simply didn't make it.
yah, it’s the partial idiots who are hard to discern. complete idiots are the easiest to dismiss out of hand.
many infections have long lasting effects. you’d need to systematically rule them out/in via testing to be as certain as you claim to be.
Consider the alternative: you would have to come up with some kind of viral agent that did the same thing but wasn't COVID.
Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many. The test does not make the disease, it is merely positive confirmation, but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.
there is a real opportunity now for medical science to look comparatively at infectious diseases and attack them systematically and cohesively rather than myopically. hopefully we don’t squander that.
So unless you are going to go out on a limb to suggest a better alternative I suggest you leave well alone.
That happened to a lot of people. The first wave in March wasn't very big compared to later months.
You mentioned the flu season didn't happen in a different post, but that was much later, as was most masking.
> Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many.
That's a terrible way to analyze this. You were "one of many" either way.
> but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.
The symptoms aren't all that unique for a severe illness that messes up your lungs. There's no 'surprise' involved in other possible causes.
> Here, we investigated SARS-CoV-2 antibody and T cell responses in matched samples of COVID-19 convalescent individuals up to 6 months after infection. Longitudinal analysis revealed decreasing and stable spike- and nucleocapsid-specific antibody responses, respectively. In contrast, functional T cell responses remained robust, and even increased, in both frequency and intensity.
What matters to me is that I got through it, still live pretty carefully even now because I don't want a re-run if I can avoid it and I would advise anybody that hasn't had it yet and/or has not been vaccinated to go and get that done as soon as you can. This is no walk in the park, I used to be pretty fit for my age, and the last year has been a complete wipe-out. Avoid if you can.
GP is playing silly games and I'm a bit tired of those given my rather personal engagement with this particular virus, and frankly, if it is some other kind of virus then it hardly matters now, does it?
Not arguing the rest of your claims, but that's objectively not true. Based upon current estimates it was actually worse than average[1] and its season was cut short in April due to the COVID efforts[2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_United_State...