Does anyone else think they actually might have/had Coronavirus?

[mommathatwearspink]

I’ve been ill for a week now and currently self-isolating along with the rest of my household. I don’t feel too bad now, just a tad lousy and able to work from home. My symptoms have been:-

• Achy all over
• Exhaustion & sleeping as much as possible
• Headaches
• Chesty / mucus cough that is getting worse but not so much that it’s really causing me a major concern
• Sore throat
• Snotty nose and feeling bunged up
• Woke up this morning with bloodshot and crusty eyes

It’s very strange and the more I read, the more I think I may actually have a mild case of Corona.

And I hardly never get ill, or get colds!

But a friend of my daughter - her whole family do have it. Tested positive and the symptoms they all had were runny nose, fever, banging headache & exhaustion

OP your snotty nose and crusty eyes suggest to me (a random person on the internet) that you have another virus.

Over Christmas DS came home from uni with exactly corona virus symptoms. The coughing was continuous, all day and night and quite horrendous for him. He even insisted I take him to the walk in center on Boxing Day because he felt so bad. But none of us caught it off him, so my guess is it was just a regular virus he picked up in a crowded pub.

Until we have easily available testing die the virus and for antibodies we just won't know.

@paintcolourwoes it's Newcastle university, so while we're not a hotspot we may never know how widely spread the infection was here. All the students have now left so will take any infections with them, and as only those in hospital are being tested there's no way of knowing. We currently have about 50 confirmed cases in hospital and five deaths in the area.

I'm actually more convinced that it came from DD's time in London - given that there three weeks ahead of the country generally in terms of infection, it seems reasonable that at the end of January there was plenty of it about. Particularly on crowded tubes, theatres etc. And there's also the connection with Malaysia.

But yes, we do have a huge number of Chinese students here and many of them are on DD's course and had just returned from China after the break. And you're right in that many may not have shown symptoms, or only mild ones, because of their age.

Why do people think they had it back in Jan/Feb? Surely if it was here then, then it would have already spread and we would already be seeing the huge numbers of deaths that we are expecting in the next few weeks? It doesn't make sense?

My family is currently self isolating with what I am 99% sure is CV. All the classic symptoms, has hit DH hardest, kids got off most lightly, I would be shocked if it wasn't it.

I am sure I had it for 7 weeks, still not 100%. Most of my friends have had it, even a 22 year old. Caught through friends who brought it back from South Africa, they were in contact with Chinese tourists. It was in China in November. It may have mutated and got worse since

I would like to be tested as I have volunteered to do deliveries locally for people who can’t get out.

@LambriniSocialist hospitals weren't testing anyone with symptoms then. If you died from what appeared to be seasonal flu, for example, but was actually Covid 19, there'd be no record of it. There's no way of knowing how many people actually died from it before testing was introduced.

hospitals weren't testing anyone with symptoms then. If you died from what appeared to be seasonal flu, for example, but was actually Covid 19, there'd be no record of it. There's no way of knowing how many people actually died from it before testing was introduced.

But wouldn't the hospitals have been seeing an unexplained rise in deaths and cases of people needing ventilators, more than usual? Look how little time it has taken to get the where we are now from the first 'confirmed' CV death. If it were here in Jan, a big rise in deaths would have already been happening?

@QuimJongUn - ah Southampton here. I’m not saying it’s likely, but I do think it’s possible. I did see a GP, and was asked about travel. I also saw a GP and a practice nurse with my 3yo at the same time. He had a horrible cough (not unusual for that age group) and kept waking up in the night sobbing that his chest hurt.

As for the deaths - at the moment we seem to be reporting every death where someone has tested positive. We don’t have information about whether death was as a direct result of covid, whether death was accelerated by the virus, and how much covid has changed life expectancy at an individual level. If deaths are occurring in populations that may have died from seasonal flu they may not have been recorded early on in an outbreak. That’s not to say these deaths are unimportant, just we don’t have a full picture

Not sure, very mild symptoms, stuffy nose and itchy eyes (both supposedly rare symptoms) but no persistent cough, no fever. It's hay fever of course. Until the antibody test is widely rolled out we won't know but a small scale sample showed a lot of people who didn't know they had had it were immune so obviously were mild cases/asymptomatic, this would make the death/serious complications rate far lower, they estimated at 5% for hospitalisation and 0.2% death. Not sure if it's published yet because I got it from a friend who was on the research team. We know certain people are very vulnerable, hence the shielding but for the rest of us we either have caught it or will in the next few weeks, and we'll be fine - let's be positive.

I personally think I've either had or still got it, but who knows? Ive never felt like this. Not terribly poorly but feel odd. I've had Adenovirus a couple of years ago and that made me feel like I was dying! What's this thing going to do? My fever was raging.

Had sore throat and severe heartburn for a week. My chest also feels right. On/off fever and yesterday I felt so fatigued that my eyes just kept closing randomly and I was thinking strange thoughts.

Me, early March v high temperature over 40 coming down to 39 with paracetamol for 4 days. Blocked sinus / ears, no taste/smell, nausea, diarrhoea, exhaustion, slight cough after a few days but was productive, no appetite.

I actually went to GP and they said they didn’t know what it was, discounted cv as I hadn’t been anywhere and not in contact with confirmed case. Ear and chest was clear, slightly red throat, gave me antibiotics as temperature was so high. Now there’s all this talk of other symptoms (mostly smell/taste and diarrhoea) am thinking might have had it, either that or this is another thing doing the rounds!!

DD had 2 days of being hot and totally wiped out at the end of February. DH has Chinese colleagues who were still visiting until January and workmates still going out there till then!

Although the smell and taste thing is something I have been suffering from this week (I keep imagining smells when I am sleeping and it’s waking me up) and I’ve had a headache for 5 days (put it down to stress). I couldn’t taste garlic last night.

I’m sw London so lots of cases in this area during early March, especially according to my sister who works at local hospital and said there were 300 confirmed cases during that week with bad symptoms but sent home to self isolate.

I'm convinced myself and my work colleagues had it December /January. We all had the worst"cold" we have ever had - totally unlike any other. Chills, temperature, body aches, exhaustion, and a cough that was awful.. And it all just kept coming back and back (you would maybe get a day where you felt better, but next day be back to square one).. Lasted for 6/7weeks and then went. Awful, and we all caught it. Wasn't normal, whatever it was.

I'd wager that a good proportion of those replying here also just had a cold or maybe flu. Every year I have a dry cough I can't shift for weeks, generally feel like shit and can't smell/taste for days, but it's just a bad cold and it most likely will be when I catch it this year too

I have had flu (one of the nasty types) and I have colds that always turn to a cough.

This wasn’t like that.

Whilst the initial symptoms are like proper flu I seemed to shake it off after a few days which is completely unprecedented for me. I did think it was strange at the time.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks and the cough was something very very different to a normal cough.

When it says “persistent cough” they mean continuous cough.
Someone said you can’t cough for every minute of the day. Yes you can.
The cough for me was the worse part. If I could have stopped coughing for a couple of hours I could have got much needed sleep. But I couldn’t sleep because i was coughing all the time.

And coughing so violently that I honestly thought I would have a heart attack or my lungs would burst.

I had all the symptoms of cv, in fact if I had what i had then, now, I would be convinced I'd had it

WE DIDN'T HAVE IT!!

@Tonyaster was you tested?

Plenty of people will have had it Tonyaster. The government reckons about 1000 cases for every death right now. 422 deaths yesterday, that makes a lot of people.

I would much much rather everyone with possible symptoms treated it as if it was COVID-19 than people acted like one of my colleagues did and trotted into the crowded office with a fever and a cough two weeks ago because “oooh it won’t be that, it’s just a bug, I’ve got too much to do to work from home.”

If I'd had what I had in Feb now, I'd be convinced it was cv. But it couldn't have been, so that means there is something really similar and less deadly doing the rounds

How do you know you it couldn’t have been?

Corona has been around since November at least and as no one was testing for Corona or even thinking of it so everyone who had something similar was diagnosed with Flu/Chest infection

I don’t know how you can say it was less deadly.
I actually thought I could die. Remember thinking that dmil who is very elderly wouldn’t survive this or if I was a smoker I would have been dead

I was at one point fighting to breathe and my lungs when I coughed felt like they had some serious damage to them.

If I didn’t have Corona and what I had was a similar less deadly illness then if I got Corona I think I would be one of the fatalities and it is a lot more deadly than it is appearing.

I couldn’t imagine feeling any worse and surviving.

I am late 50s with no underlying health conditions.
I don’t even have hay fever

Ds who had the same illness was knocked off his feet for at least a week and took a good month/6 weeks to get fully recovered.
He was doing quite light work but ended up in bed wiped out after a few tasks.

I know he was not right even after the initial illness as not only wasn’t he hungry he had no interest in his xbox

If Coronavirus was here in Jan, and particularly if there was already community spread in Jan, then we would already be peaking! The NHS would already be overwhelmed, the Excel centre would already be full of patients.

It would have spread at the same rate back in Jan as it is now, which is fast.

I'm not saying its not possible that there were a few deaths from CV before the first official death was identified, but surely its an impossibility for it to have been in the community in Jan, and for us to be where we are now with it?!

Why do people think it would have been spreading really slowly back in January, but now suddenly has started spreading really quickly and only causing a big rise in deaths now?

I have had a suspicion that we had already had it in December for a number of reasons, including contact with someone who had travelled to Hong Kong, and this makes me think so more:

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-may-have-infected-half-of-uk-population-—-oxford-study/ar-BB11DVwS?MSCC=1585129491&ocid=spartandhp

In particular, this:

“The modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.”

I am not sure why it would cause more deaths now though - maybe previously tested/unreported and just attributed to seasonal flu, or hospitals able to cope better due to less cases.

"untested"