9 ms·

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been relatively mild, in the literal sense. The primary discomfort has likely been the anxiety of how the tightness in my chest might progress (which ironically can also cause chest tightness). I'm in a low risk group. I had lethargy and high fever the first day of symptoms (a little over a day after high contact exposure to my suspected source), then no fever (or very mild fever, can't tell because I have no thermometer), dry eyes, consistent mild chest tightness and occasional cough for the following two days (to present). The person I believe I contracted it from is also in a low risk group and had a sore throat and persistent cough for about 5 days, and is currently asymptomatic. She had been going about her business thinking it was just a cold for the duration of her symptoms. Testing is still difficult in my area, and many folks with mild symptoms like the aforementioned aren't even attempting to get tested, so I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases. This is good in that it means the death rate is also off by that factor, but bad in that there will not be enough fear/incentive for the primary carriers (young adults) to adhere to adequate social distancing. It's an unfortunate externality when an infectious disease has discriminatory consequences.

mtsr 7y ago
Mean incubation period is 5.6 days (range 1-14). So while possible, it’s highly unlikely you got it 1 day after infection.
- lend000 7y ago
  "Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions. It's possible I picked it up elsewhere, and less likely that I have something else with these unique symptoms (I've never a had fever without nasal congestion or gastrointestinal symptoms before). However, I think it makes sense I would be at the lower incubation period range due to the high level of contact with said suspect and the fact that I'm an otherwise healthy young adult, which as I understand it can lead to the immune system reacting faster.
  - nardi 7y ago
    > "Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions. Just wanted to boost this. With a range of 1–14 days, it's possible for close to 50% of infections to only incubate for ~1 day, and still have a mean of 5.6 days for incubation. Without knowledge of the distribution, the mean means nothing.
    - nardi 7y ago
      Just realized I understated this. It's actually possible for 64.6% of infections to only incubate for 1 day and get a mean of 5.6 days, if the other 35.4% of infections incubate for 14 days (i.e. an extremely bimodal distribution at 1 and 14 days).
- robocat 7y ago
  “We estimated that fewer than 2.5% of infected persons will show symptoms within 2.2 days (CI, 1.8 to 2.9 days) of exposure, and symptom onset will occur within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) for 97.5% of infected persons.” From https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period...
torpidor 7y ago
Similarly, I'm not a confirmed case but I've been isolation since Friday just out of general precaution, and I developed a mild chest tightness while here. I was sure it wasn't covid because I didn't have a fever, but just a few hours ago I checked again and I have a borderline one (99.4). Then my girlfriend got an email that someone tested positive from the same floor in her office. I don't qualify for a test and my doctor said don't bother coming in with my current symptoms and risk profile. Still waiting to hear back about whether my girlfriend qualifies, who has a closer connection to a case and an underlying health condition. Last weekend we were very nearly at a small conference. We had zero symptoms. Even now I'm not sure if I have covid, a cold, or if I'm just stressing myself into seeing something that isn't there. I would be a lot more stressed if I had gone to that conference, and given people there whatever it is I have.
- rv-de 7y ago
  Same here, persistent mild chest pressure. My girlfriend as well as myself are experiencing it. But it's so subtle that you start to question it at times. But especially when lying in bed it becomes quite annoying or frightening if I think too much about it.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    The 'it feels worse when lying in bed' is something I can really identify with
  - mNovak 7y ago
    Same boat--annoying overlap that anxiety causes the same symptom. Luckily I've always worked from home, so have been pretty well isolated.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    Hey, here with you. I have chest tightness (and sometimes a stabby pain) and it feels like I cannot breathe as well. Going on for almost two weeks now - no other symptoms at all. I called in with a physician and they said likely not covid, just muscular stuff. I also have allergies and thing begin to bloom... So I am confused and worried, lots of anxiety. But it could just be allergies or something muscular from workout (had that before).
md224 7y ago
> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases. This is good in that it means the death rate is also off by that factor, but bad in that there will not be enough fear/incentive for the primary carriers (young adults) to adhere to adequate social distancing. If the death rate is off by 10x-50x, isn't this approaching the death rate of seasonal influenza, in which case we didn't actually need to adhere to social distancing in the first place?
- pcl 7y ago
  The disease also appears to spread much faster than the flu. So even if the death rate is comparable, the infection rate is likely to be far higher.
  - eteos 7y ago
    This is likely because our immume system is not familliar with this virus yet.
    - Jedd 7y ago
      This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months', opening the door to multiple infections per year per person.
      - easytiger 7y ago
        > This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months', There is no evidence either way. Even if it is transient it will be enough for it to die down
        Jedd 7y ago
        There's some very strong indicators that immunity will be ephemeral. It's possible the R naught will drop below the currently assessed 2.2 over time, but there's no evidence for that -- and if both these things stay as expected, it won't be transient enough to 'die down' naturally.
aritmo 7y ago
Exactly the same. Considering that antimalarial drugs have positive impact against COVID-19, do you happen to be a carrier of thalassaemia? Those with the trait of thalassaemia happen to have a better chance not contracting malaria, hence the prevelance around the Mediterranean.
- robbiep 7y ago
  What are you saying, that thalassaemia is protective against COVID? Thalassaemia protects against malaria because blood cells (the home of the parasite during a phase of its lifecycle) are destroyed up to 3-4x faster than in non-thalassaemia traits (where they last on average for 120 days). Chloroquine seems to work by interfering with cellular binding and entry of SARS-CoV-2 on the ACE2 receptor (amongst other mechanisms) This is why only people with training or understanding should speak about medical matters, there is enough rubbish out there (particularly at the moment) without you adding to the noise (0) https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/#chloroquine https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/#chloroquine
easytiger 7y ago
Same here in London over a month ago. Though my wife and I did develop mild respiratory problems. I've been arguing for days that the death rates are complete fantasy. People still only using tested cases / deaths when in fact no one is being tested. In South Korea, as of the weekend only 248,000 people out of a population of 50,000,000, with 8,086 +ve cases and 72 deaths. Without statistical extrapolation that's a <1% death rate. Real rate a fraction again of that. Hospitalisation rate is high because an abundance of caution due to the publicity around this. Regarding your fear about primary carriers, the advice in the UK is not to visit vulnerable groups. If you are asymptomatic you are also less likely to cough etc and died the disease. In my office culture anyone who is sick is told to go home and made to feel unwelcome (in a friendly way) Had been this way for decades. We know not to visit each other.
Onanymous 7y ago
> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases I came to similar conclusion just looking at the openly available numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries If you compare the number of serious cases to the number of total cases for different countries you'll get a 10x difference. Norway tests more thoroughly then the other countries, so it has a huge number of active cases. But from those only ~2% serious. There may be different reasons for such a discrepancy but I tend to agree with your conclusion that we have a lot of asymptomatic cases around, higher then estimated R0 and lower then estimated fatality.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  I made a simple site to graph the daily increase figures. It only shows infections and deaths but from that you can see very different ratios for different countries. (http://coronanalytics.com http://coronanalytics.com if you’re interested.)
  - underlines 7y ago
    do you respect the time delay when calculating Case Fatality Rate? https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203 https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203
    - jonplackett 7y ago
      I’m just using the data straight from the John Hopkins institute. https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
  - travisr 7y ago
    You might try sorting the countries in your select input. They appear to be in some random order and I almost gave up looking for the country I was interested in.
    - jonplackett 7y ago
lqet 7y ago
> dry eyes Also no confirmed case here, but I attended a conference and later got an email that one participant tested positive. Since a few days, I also have dry eyes (thought it was because of dry heating air in our apartment first, but it didn't go away for days as it normally does, not even yesterday when we did not had the heating on because of the warm weather), dry cough and I am a little tired. 2 days ago I had an aching sore throat starting in the evening, but it went away during the night and after several very strong cups of fresh hot ginger tea. Also a runny nose. Yesterday I decided to work from home, my wife also couldn't go to work because she also developed a strong dry cough Sunday evening and she decided to better stay at home. Felt a bit tired while working yesterday (and also a bit confused), so my wife suggested I might also have a light fever, but I didn't take any measurement because I really felt fine. She herself had intermittent fever the whole day yesterday, going up to 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 Fahrenheit), so nothing really serious and she felt fine otherwise. Our 12 month old daughter woke us up several times two nights ago with an extremely scary cough, but it didn't seemed to bother her and she continued sleeping. Yesterday morning, though, she looked quite unhappy, was still extremely tired and then basically slept for the whole day, from the morning to the late afternoon. When she woke up, she was completely happy again, no fever, no cough. I have no idea if we have the virus, but after reading some comments here, I think there is at least a possibility. So far it was really just a nuisance, any cold I had in the last years was much, much worse. Without the media coverage, I would've just shrugged it of and continued to go to work.
- joachim4 7y ago
  I have similar symptoms to yours. I live in Paris and the number of cases here are exploding, but so far for me the mains symptoms are an high temperature, general tiredness and a sore throat/ dry eyes. So far so good, but each day passing I feel a bit more tired. The doctor advised me to take paracetamol every 4 hours, and to stay inside. Also here in France, they are sending SMS to any suspected case with advices and to know if the symptoms are evolving towards the worse case, which is the difficulty to breath.
- majewsky 7y ago
  Dry cough and fever are the most common symptoms of Covid. Given that you display both, staying at home is definitely the correct behavior. Also get on the phone with your GP or the respective coronavirus hotline for your country to inquire about the next steps.
slurms 7y ago
> "high contact exposure to my suspected source" An attempt at levity, but sounds to me like you're saying you hooked up with a girl, despite her being sick...
drclau 7y ago
Note that I am not an M.D. But, consider getting a pulse oximeter. You can use it to assess your respiratory function (more) objectively. Anxiety and panic attacks can impact your oxygen saturation, but unlikely to do so to dangerous levels. Again, I'm not an MD. Maybe someone from the field of medicine can add their thoughts here.
- gozmike 7y ago
  Your comment made me want to get an Oximeter so i hopped on amazon right now. These were my results: https://i.imgur.com/LIta2jR.png https://i.imgur.com/LIta2jR.png One of these things just doesn't belong!!!
  - drclau 7y ago
    LOL, thanks a lot for sharing! Really made my day here, and I needed that :)

mtsr 7y ago

Mean incubation period is 5.6 days (range 1-14). So while possible, it’s highly unlikely you got it 1 day after infection.

lend000 7y ago
"Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions. It's possible I picked it up elsewhere, and less likely that I have something else with these unique symptoms (I've never a had fever without nasal congestion or gastrointestinal symptoms before). However, I think it makes sense I would be at the lower incubation period range due to the high level of contact with said suspect and the fact that I'm an otherwise healthy young adult, which as I understand it can lead to the immune system reacting faster.
- nardi 7y ago
  > "Mean" means nothing in the context of probability distributions. Just wanted to boost this. With a range of 1–14 days, it's possible for close to 50% of infections to only incubate for ~1 day, and still have a mean of 5.6 days for incubation. Without knowledge of the distribution, the mean means nothing.
  - nardi 7y ago
    Just realized I understated this. It's actually possible for 64.6% of infections to only incubate for 1 day and get a mean of 5.6 days, if the other 35.4% of infections incubate for 14 days (i.e. an extremely bimodal distribution at 1 and 14 days).
robocat 7y ago
“We estimated that fewer than 2.5% of infected persons will show symptoms within 2.2 days (CI, 1.8 to 2.9 days) of exposure, and symptom onset will occur within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) for 97.5% of infected persons.” From https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period...

torpidor 7y ago

Similarly, I'm not a confirmed case but I've been isolation since Friday just out of general precaution, and I developed a mild chest tightness while here. I was sure it wasn't covid because I didn't have a fever, but just a few hours ago I checked again and I have a borderline one (99.4). Then my girlfriend got an email that someone tested positive from the same floor in her office. I don't qualify for a test and my doctor said don't bother coming in with my current symptoms and risk profile. Still waiting to hear back about whether my girlfriend qualifies, who has a closer connection to a case and an underlying health condition. Last weekend we were very nearly at a small conference. We had zero symptoms. Even now I'm not sure if I have covid, a cold, or if I'm just stressing myself into seeing something that isn't there. I would be a lot more stressed if I had gone to that conference, and given people there whatever it is I have.

rv-de 7y ago
Same here, persistent mild chest pressure. My girlfriend as well as myself are experiencing it. But it's so subtle that you start to question it at times. But especially when lying in bed it becomes quite annoying or frightening if I think too much about it.
- notahacker 7y ago
  The 'it feels worse when lying in bed' is something I can really identify with
- mNovak 7y ago
  Same boat--annoying overlap that anxiety causes the same symptom. Luckily I've always worked from home, so have been pretty well isolated.
- neuronic 7y ago
  Hey, here with you. I have chest tightness (and sometimes a stabby pain) and it feels like I cannot breathe as well. Going on for almost two weeks now - no other symptoms at all. I called in with a physician and they said likely not covid, just muscular stuff. I also have allergies and thing begin to bloom... So I am confused and worried, lots of anxiety. But it could just be allergies or something muscular from workout (had that before).

md224 7y ago

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases. This is good in that it means the death rate is also off by that factor, but bad in that there will not be enough fear/incentive for the primary carriers (young adults) to adhere to adequate social distancing. If the death rate is off by 10x-50x, isn't this approaching the death rate of seasonal influenza, in which case we didn't actually need to adhere to social distancing in the first place?

pcl 7y ago
The disease also appears to spread much faster than the flu. So even if the death rate is comparable, the infection rate is likely to be far higher.
- eteos 7y ago
  This is likely because our immume system is not familliar with this virus yet.
  - Jedd 7y ago
    This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months', opening the door to multiple infections per year per person.
    - easytiger 7y ago
      > This doesn't add up either -- immunity per individual is expected to last 'only a few months', There is no evidence either way. Even if it is transient it will be enough for it to die down
      - Jedd 7y ago
        There's some very strong indicators that immunity will be ephemeral. It's possible the R naught will drop below the currently assessed 2.2 over time, but there's no evidence for that -- and if both these things stay as expected, it won't be transient enough to 'die down' naturally.

aritmo 7y ago

Exactly the same. Considering that antimalarial drugs have positive impact against COVID-19, do you happen to be a carrier of thalassaemia? Those with the trait of thalassaemia happen to have a better chance not contracting malaria, hence the prevelance around the Mediterranean.

robbiep 7y ago
What are you saying, that thalassaemia is protective against COVID? Thalassaemia protects against malaria because blood cells (the home of the parasite during a phase of its lifecycle) are destroyed up to 3-4x faster than in non-thalassaemia traits (where they last on average for 120 days). Chloroquine seems to work by interfering with cellular binding and entry of SARS-CoV-2 on the ACE2 receptor (amongst other mechanisms) This is why only people with training or understanding should speak about medical matters, there is enough rubbish out there (particularly at the moment) without you adding to the noise (0) https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/#chloroquine https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/#chloroquine

easytiger 7y ago

Same here in London over a month ago. Though my wife and I did develop mild respiratory problems. I've been arguing for days that the death rates are complete fantasy. People still only using tested cases / deaths when in fact no one is being tested. In South Korea, as of the weekend only 248,000 people out of a population of 50,000,000, with 8,086 +ve cases and 72 deaths. Without statistical extrapolation that's a <1% death rate. Real rate a fraction again of that. Hospitalisation rate is high because an abundance of caution due to the publicity around this. Regarding your fear about primary carriers, the advice in the UK is not to visit vulnerable groups. If you are asymptomatic you are also less likely to cough etc and died the disease. In my office culture anyone who is sick is told to go home and made to feel unwelcome (in a friendly way) Had been this way for decades. We know not to visit each other.

Onanymous 7y ago

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases I came to similar conclusion just looking at the openly available numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries If you compare the number of serious cases to the number of total cases for different countries you'll get a 10x difference. Norway tests more thoroughly then the other countries, so it has a huge number of active cases. But from those only ~2% serious. There may be different reasons for such a discrepancy but I tend to agree with your conclusion that we have a lot of asymptomatic cases around, higher then estimated R0 and lower then estimated fatality.

jonplackett 7y ago
I made a simple site to graph the daily increase figures. It only shows infections and deaths but from that you can see very different ratios for different countries. (http://coronanalytics.com http://coronanalytics.com if you’re interested.)
- underlines 7y ago
  do you respect the time delay when calculating Case Fatality Rate? https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203 https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    I’m just using the data straight from the John Hopkins institute. https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
- travisr 7y ago
  You might try sorting the countries in your select input. They appear to be in some random order and I almost gave up looking for the country I was interested in.
  - jonplackett 7y ago

lqet 7y ago

> dry eyes Also no confirmed case here, but I attended a conference and later got an email that one participant tested positive. Since a few days, I also have dry eyes (thought it was because of dry heating air in our apartment first, but it didn't go away for days as it normally does, not even yesterday when we did not had the heating on because of the warm weather), dry cough and I am a little tired. 2 days ago I had an aching sore throat starting in the evening, but it went away during the night and after several very strong cups of fresh hot ginger tea. Also a runny nose. Yesterday I decided to work from home, my wife also couldn't go to work because she also developed a strong dry cough Sunday evening and she decided to better stay at home. Felt a bit tired while working yesterday (and also a bit confused), so my wife suggested I might also have a light fever, but I didn't take any measurement because I really felt fine. She herself had intermittent fever the whole day yesterday, going up to 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 Fahrenheit), so nothing really serious and she felt fine otherwise. Our 12 month old daughter woke us up several times two nights ago with an extremely scary cough, but it didn't seemed to bother her and she continued sleeping. Yesterday morning, though, she looked quite unhappy, was still extremely tired and then basically slept for the whole day, from the morning to the late afternoon. When she woke up, she was completely happy again, no fever, no cough. I have no idea if we have the virus, but after reading some comments here, I think there is at least a possibility. So far it was really just a nuisance, any cold I had in the last years was much, much worse. Without the media coverage, I would've just shrugged it of and continued to go to work.

joachim4 7y ago
I have similar symptoms to yours. I live in Paris and the number of cases here are exploding, but so far for me the mains symptoms are an high temperature, general tiredness and a sore throat/ dry eyes. So far so good, but each day passing I feel a bit more tired. The doctor advised me to take paracetamol every 4 hours, and to stay inside. Also here in France, they are sending SMS to any suspected case with advices and to know if the symptoms are evolving towards the worse case, which is the difficulty to breath.
majewsky 7y ago
Dry cough and fever are the most common symptoms of Covid. Given that you display both, staying at home is definitely the correct behavior. Also get on the phone with your GP or the respective coronavirus hotline for your country to inquire about the next steps.

slurms 7y ago

> "high contact exposure to my suspected source" An attempt at levity, but sounds to me like you're saying you hooked up with a girl, despite her being sick...

drclau 7y ago

Note that I am not an M.D. But, consider getting a pulse oximeter. You can use it to assess your respiratory function (more) objectively. Anxiety and panic attacks can impact your oxygen saturation, but unlikely to do so to dangerous levels. Again, I'm not an MD. Maybe someone from the field of medicine can add their thoughts here.

gozmike 7y ago
Your comment made me want to get an Oximeter so i hopped on amazon right now. These were my results: https://i.imgur.com/LIta2jR.png https://i.imgur.com/LIta2jR.png One of these things just doesn't belong!!!
- drclau 7y ago
  LOL, thanks a lot for sharing! Really made my day here, and I needed that :)