SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Tested positive for third time since November.
 
Nice way to start my summer vacation by testing positive. 3 Pfizers and I haven't got a clue where and how. Was pretty sick for two days but getting better.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Jaysus that’s shit luck. Did you get a booster last winter?
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Yeah but I tested positive around the same time.

Anyway this time was the mildest case but also the first time I’ve had a temperature with it.
 
2cents said:
Yeah but I tested positive around the same time.

Anyway this time was the mildest case but also the first time I’ve had a temperature with it.
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I honestly can’t remember how often I got mild viral illnesses pre-covid. Probably about a similar frequency as you have since November. I’m currently under the weather (testing negative) after having my first experience with covid in April. I actually think it would do us all good to stop testing and deal with each illness on its own merits. A few mild viral illnesses a year is basically normal. I only tested myself because the wife was nagging me so much!
 
Family and I have tested positive again twice in 6 months.
Didn’t know it was cut to 5 days isolation, seems a bit severe to me
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I honestly can’t remember how often I got mild viral illnesses pre-covid. Probably about a similar frequency as you have since November. I’m currently under the weather (testing negative) after having my first experience with covid in April. I actually think it would do us all good to stop testing and deal with each illness on its own merits. A few mild viral illnesses a year is basically normal. I only tested myself because the wife was nagging me so much!
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I've now had it 3 times (first Oct 21 and now just done with the third), but there's no way I would have known about the latter 2 if it wasn't for precautionary testing. Genuinely baffled each time it came up as positive.

Think it's worth still testing (work requirements/more vulnerable), but it's hard to think of the current wave as being anything close to what we've already gone through.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I honestly can’t remember how often I got mild viral illnesses pre-covid. Probably about a similar frequency as you have since November. I’m currently under the weather (testing negative) after having my first experience with covid in April. I actually think it would do us all good to stop testing and deal with each illness on its own merits. A few mild viral illnesses a year is basically normal. I only tested myself because the wife was nagging me so much!
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Surprised by you saying that. A test takes minutes but the result can help you decide if you really should go to great aunt Maggies 90th birthday at the nursing home, or whether you’re safe to go into a medical appointment in the hospital etc
 
golden_blunder said:
Surprised by you saying that. A test takes minutes but the result can help you decide if you really should go to great aunt Maggies 90th birthday at the nursing home, or whether you’re safe to go into a medical appointment in the hospital etc
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Well the official guidance is to not take a test if you feel unwell. If you have symptoms wait until 48 hours after they’ve passed before doing any of the above. Which makes perfect sense to me.

To be fair, there are some scenarios where I still test myself no matter how I feel. I have a friend who is very medically vulnerable and I’ll test myself if I’m going to hang out at his place for an evening. Other than that, though, I’m done with testing. Life moves on. It’s time to put most of this stuff behind us.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Well the official guidance is to not take a test if you feel unwell. If you have symptoms wait until 48 hours after they’ve passed before doing any of the above. Which makes perfect sense to me.

To be fair, there are some scenarios where I still test myself no matter how I feel. I have a friend who is very medically vulnerable and I’ll test myself if I’m going to hang out at his place for an evening. Other than that, though, I’m done with testing. Life moves on. It’s time to put most of this stuff behind us.
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So you’d continue into a medical environment without testing even if you have some symptoms?
 
golden_blunder said:
So you’d continue into a medical environment without testing even if you have some symptoms?
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Come on, geebs. Read what I wrote. I’ll be following the official guidance. Isolating myself until 48 hours after symptoms have passed. In fact, I’m doing that right now! (have head cold since the weekend) Once those 48 hours are up, it’s back to living as normal.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Come on, geebs. Read what I wrote. I’ll be following the official guidance. Isolating myself until 48 hours after symptoms have passed. In fact, I’m doing that right now! (have head cold since the weekend) Once those 48 hours are up, it’s back to living as normal.
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Fair enough but I’ll ask you this; how do they tell how bad a strain is if no one is testing anymore? Serious question. It seems very Trumpesque
 
golden_blunder said:
Fair enough but I’ll ask you this; how do they tell how bad a strain is if no one is testing anymore? Serious question. It seems very Trumpesque
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Same as they do with any other virus. A combination of the testing they will continue to do for very sick patient in hospital and surveillance programs in the community.

You and me jamming cotton buds up the noses of everyone in our family at the first hint of a sniffle never did anything to monitor new strains anyway.
 
golden_blunder said:
Fair enough but I’ll ask you this; how do they tell how bad a strain is if no one is testing anymore? Serious question. It seems very Trumpesque
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The ONS survey continues in the UK. They do sequencing on their positive results so we'll see any strain that's got a significant community prevalence. Hospital surveillance continues as well, mostly on inpatients which is where we get severity data - only a few countries ever did much work on that anyway, and the ones who did, still do but at a lower scale.

Most countries don't do the equivalent of the ONS survey. Like flu, they are mostly only looking at what they have to know for medical treatment.

Large scale sequencing has always been a thing done only by a minority of countries - so not as much as changed as you might think when it comes to capturing new mutations.
 
Italy has today opened 4th dose bookings for over-60s, only the big centres are open so it's a long drive, but never mind. I'm surprised they've done it so quickly, really.
 
arnie_ni said:
How bad is this strain? The wife's 90plus year old granny has just got it.
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It seems to be a bit worse than omicron but not as bad as the first strain perhaps more contagious

I hope she will be ok
 
arnie_ni said:
How bad is this strain? The wife's 90plus year old granny has just got it.
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There's a big element of luck involved for everyone, not just the over 90s, though they're the group at highest risk. The odds are firmly on her side though, even at her age, and if she's vaccinated she's done what she can to be prepared. Compared to previous mutations, this one is not as bad as Alpha or Delta but it is infecting a lot of people.

Standard advice - stay hydrated, eat what you can, rest. Most people will get better in a few days. Hopefully someone is keeping tabs on her to make sure she is ok, and can get her medical help if she needs it.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Well the official guidance is to not take a test if you feel unwell. If you have symptoms wait until 48 hours after they’ve passed before doing any of the above. Which makes perfect sense to me.

To be fair, there are some scenarios where I still test myself no matter how I feel. I have a friend who is very medically vulnerable and I’ll test myself if I’m going to hang out at his place for an evening. Other than that, though, I’m done with testing. Life moves on. It’s time to put most of this stuff behind us.
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I have never taken a rapid test as a precaution due to the high false negative when viral load is low. In retrospect I did have one mild cold for a day or so but there were no chest symptoms at all and barely a sniffle. I isolated as I would for a cold or flu as I've always hated people going in to work sick to prove something or other. I now wonder if I had an nearly asymptomatic covid infection. Now had my 4th shot so hoping even if I do get it that it should be very mild.
 
Wibble said:
I have never taken a rapid test as a precaution due to the high false negative when viral load is low. In retrospect I did have one mild cold for a day or so but there were no chest symptoms at all and barely a sniffle. I isolated as I would for a cold or flu as I've always hated people going in to work sick to prove something or other. I now wonder if I had an nearly asymptomatic covid infection. Now had my 4th shot so hoping even if I do get it that it should be very mild.
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After taking about six tests in the past weeks due to constant exposures I can safely say that RAT tests are great if you're already actually sick, otherwise they're pointless. The symptoms come before you trigger a test, at least that's been the experience for me, my family and my friends. They seem very reliable at determining whether what you have is actually covid or not, though.
 
Feck me cases went from 1000 new cases a day on the 8th, to 190,000 new cases a day on the 13th?

How does that happen, never seen such a drastic rise before. Is it due to a lack of people getting tested compared to the last few years, but then if it is how did 190,000 new cases suddenly get identified? Are symptoms getting worse again and people are now testing again over the past week?
 
DeGea’sFeet said:
Feck me cases went from 1000 new cases a day on the 8th, to 190,000 new cases a day on the 13th?

How does that happen, never seen such a drastic rise before. Is it due to a lack of people getting tested compared to the last few years, but then if it is how did 190,000 new cases suddenly get identified? Are symptoms getting worse again and people are now testing again over the past week?
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Eh. Where in the world are you? What report are you looking at?

The UK, like most of the world, has pretty much stopped routine testing. It's only really hospital admissions and healthcare staff who are getting tested now. We know from the ONS survey that around 4/5% of the population would test positive for covid this week, but that measure hasn't been below 1% for months.

There is a surge in hospital admissions at the moment, caused by BA5, but the growth is tailing off now and (if the trend continues) could start falling next week.
 
jojojo said:
Eh. Where in the world are you? What report are you looking at?

The UK, like most of the world, has pretty much stopped routine testing. It's only really hospital admissions and healthcare staff who are getting tested now. We know from the ONS survey that around 4/5% of the population would test positive for covid this week, but that measure hasn't been below 1% for months.

There is a surge in hospital admissions at the moment, caused by BA5, but the growth is tailing off now and (if the trend continues) could start falling next week.
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Hopefully you’re right about it falling off. I heard cases were on the rises & noticed more disruption to daily services in the past week or so, didn’t connect it was people off due to covid thou, just had a bit of a heart attack when I checked the stats and saw 190,000 plus infections yesterday Vs 1000 last Friday.
 
DeGea’sFeet said:
Hopefully you’re right about it falling off. I heard cases were on the rises & noticed more disruption to daily services in the past week or so, didn’t connect it was people off due to covid thou, just had a bit of a heart attack when I checked the stats and saw 190,000 plus infections yesterday Vs 1000 last Friday.
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Where did you see those numbers? Basically we are running at about 190k cases/day if you count all the cases (symptomatic and asymptomatic) if you use the ONS random survey and scale up the numbers to get a whole country figure but we haven't been down at 1000 since early 2020
 
jojojo said:
Where did you see those numbers?
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The Google chart page. They show daily infections, 7 day average, deaths, and can also show hospitalisations. The data comes from “Our World in Data” who i think takes it from various gov & health sites.
 
DeGea’sFeet said:
The Google chart page. They show daily infections, 7 day average, deaths, and can also show hospitalisations. The data comes from “Our World in Data” who i think takes it from various gov & health sites.
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That's a database anomaly. Every now and again the government website issues a data correction - if you use the wrong stat (the one based on "report day" rather than the ones based on "test specimen day") that shows up as wild blips on the graphs. They recently went from daily to weekly reporting, and some sites picked up a quirk of the changeover. The current daily dashboard cases stat (hospital tests and healthcare/carehome staff basically) is around 25k.
 
jojojo said:
That's a database anomaly. Every now and again the government website issues a data correction - if you use the wrong stat (the one based on "report day" rather than the ones based on "test specimen day") that shows up as wild blips on the graphs. They recently went from daily to weekly reporting, and some sites picked up a quirk of the changeover. The current daily dashboard cases stat (hospital tests and healthcare/carehome staff basically) is around 25k.
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Yeah. After your message about hospitalisations I checked the hospitalisations stats and for the 8th it showed hospitalisations were way above. Also around that time was a few days with no data available, so what you said about the recent change makes sense.
 
jojojo said:
How are you getting on now? Is it arrythmia or something else that's causing trouble now?

In a way, it's hard for us Europeans to visualise the problem created by the lack of a public health service in the US on things like this. Compensation schemes here can be sluggish to pay out but at least you aren't clocking up medical bills as well while you're waiting.

I know there's a government compensation in the US as well, but I've no idea how quick, generous or inclusive it is.

In terms of the raw averages, we know that vaccines are safer than Covid - in all approved age groups. But certainly by the time you get to people talking about fourth booster doses in healthy under 30s, the numbers aren't nearly so clear cut.

At any rate, there's still a lot of monitoring and research underway, so hopefully we'll know more before any new booster campaign starts in the autumn.

Good luck getting your own health issues sorted.
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Realized I never got around to responding. I appreciate your well wishes, thank you!

Fortunately I'm feeling much improved. But we're still uncertain about the actual cause. Seems like I may have had two separate things going on -

svt arrhythmia. Possibly triggered by dehydration + a strong decongestant I had been taking

Chest pain , radiating to arm and neck - cardiologist thinks it's highly highly unlikely to be my heart. My echo and stress test were good. Plus the timeline is just off so he doesn't think it's long covid or vaccine. Imaging shows no visible inflammation. When I do certain exercises I don't have much issue. When I run I seem to exacerbate. He thinks it could be a spine injury impinging nerves.

Now just waiting to get an appointment w the right specialist...huge hcp shortage means it takes months to get seen in some areas
 
Entire family has covid except me. They’ve all recovered now but here I am, covid free.
Is this normal? Can one person avoid bullets in a household like this?
 
Kopral Jono said:
I must have missed the memo as to when the comment section on YouTube became an antivaxx cesspool. I was just watching a video on the latest Covid strain and Jesus H., these idiots talk about being a fecking 'pureblood' like it's an achievement instead of a brain defect.
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Get a browser extension that hides comments on all websites. Your life will be better for it.
 
Moderna vaccines provisionally approved for use in kids over 6 months. Full approval and reccomendations for who needs it to follow soon.
 
Pretty sure I’ve got it again. Exact same symptoms as last time though still tested negative last night.
 
cyberman said:
Entire family has covid except me. They’ve all recovered now but here I am, covid free.
Is this normal? Can one person avoid bullets in a household like this?
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This happened with me on the first wave.

Wasn't as lucky last Christmas.
 
cyberman said:
Entire family has covid except me. They’ve all recovered now but here I am, covid free.
Is this normal? Can one person avoid bullets in a household like this?
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There’s a study underway in Ireland looking to identify people who might have innate resistance.You should register.
 
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