Am i being thick?If the first reported uk case was on jan 31st then it was here from dec/early jan then?

[Wankerchief]

Ive just read that the first confirmed case was on the 31st of jan (wiki and news sites)
Going on the two/three week incubation does that mean there was many people in Late Dec/early Jan that had it but had. No symptoms or just thought they had flu?

Dp says no but i cannot see how it cant of been here then but I've got nothing to me up

@Lemons1571 I noticed you asked the same re throat damage! How bizarre!

Derbygerbil

Maybe the problem is few people are going to pay £69 to find out even if the test is 100%

I have had flu before a couple of times
One a really nasty sort.
What we had over December/January was similar to flu but had some strange added side effects.

With flu I have never had to struggle to breathe
With flu I didn’t get conjunctivitis and other things

It still doesn’t explain if we all only had flu why Dd was the only one to not get Covid when all around her people got infected.

PicsInRedI can't wait for the truth to out on all this. The public enquiry is going to be dynamite.

Ha! It really is, isn't it.

@lucymaudmonty my throat has episodes of sounding wheezy and high pitched, and I feel a bit breathless. It feels like post viral flare ups of inflammation. I still have episodes of a tickly cough too.

I saw an ENT at the time the symptoms were at their worst. He agrees my throat was red. But ultrasound and MRI were clear so that was that.

Missed the post about throat damage.

If that is another symptom then I thought I had done permanent damage to my throat

I caught this bug off Ds and he caught it off Dd who we think caught it at an event for Chinese nationals in early December

"But I agree with others it doesn't really add up with the huge number of extra deaths from March onwards"

But it kinda does. Covid-19 mostly kills people over 70, and this cohort is a group that is least likely to have exposure to early infectious communities. As a rule, people over 70 don't commute; they don't spend time in a workplace among ill colleagues; they don't travel for business; they shop during office hours on week days (and many get home deliveries); they don't have children at schools or childcare; and in Britain, they don't live in homes with extended family and young children (unlike Italy).

So it makes sense that this group contracts Covid later than everyone else in Britain because they just don't have the exposure that someone between, say, 3 and 65 has - - unless they are or go to hospital for some reason, and we already know that a number of the deaths have been caused by Covid contracted while in hospital for something else.

Again, people over 70 don't tend to act as regular childcare for grandchildren, so that exposure channel is lessened. Okay, they may see them once or twice a week, but that's not the same as commuting on a busy train twice a day.

The group that dies from Covid are the last station on the infection line, iyswim. So it makes sense that the death rates are later on in the virus timeline.

Or we had the first wave in December/January and like other pandemics we are in the 2nd wave which is usually more deadly.

I think more of us might be immune than we realise. I spent the whole of last autumn and winter with hacking coughs and respiratory tract infections. Yet during this pandemic have never been better...

Beginning of January I was very ill with what I assumed at the time was flu...first few days I couldn't physically get out of bed...had a terrible fever and a cough which took weeks to get rid of. My chest would hurt so much when I went outside into the cold. I'm convinced I had it.

A very good article which explains how Covid-19 could have been around in low numbers for quite a while before taking off.

www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all

Maybe the problem is few people are going to pay £69 to find out even if the test is 100%

I definitely would... though I realise not everyone would be able to. It’s ripe for a proper scientific study.

I was ill over Xmas, new year and into January. Aching, coughing, shortness of breath, barely could walk. After 5 weeks went to doc who said I must have had a bad virus and take it easy. Roll on to March 12th and diarrhea started, then sore chest, burning chest and back, terrible sore throat and scary shortness of breath. I've been ill now 12 weeks now with CV.

Does this all mean I've had this twice?

Shit toots are you not feeling any better at all? That is ages...

It's been a nightmare. If I exert myself at all, my sternum aches, I get chest pain, my lungs burn and by then end of each day my voice is hoarse. Everyday is shit and with this being a new virus doctors can't say how long this is going to take to recover.

One of my symptoms was voice going hoarse. I still get flare ups of voice going a bit, alongside the symptoms I described a few posts earlier. First got ill 3rd week of January.

I wonder. I had a nasty can't get out of bed for four days "cold" in mid-December. I catch a train to a major city with the airport on that line that includes long-haul destinations. A couple of weeks later ds went down with a chest infection that took two courses of antibiotics and a steroid inhaler, and was ill for 3 weeks. He's never normally prone to chest problems, not asthmatic etc (although on second appointment, nurse raised it as a possibility). DH also had a week in bed at around that time.

I may well pay for us to have antibody tests, although with unknown long term immunity I would still be wary: if that was civid, I don't want even a mild case again.

@Tootsey11 ..hope you get better soon x

I had awful hoarseness of voice for January, a dry cough that had me waking in the middle of the night gasping for breath. The hoarseness lasted weeks as did aching chest and back. Slightly different symptoms to what my DM and exh had but looking back I said on many occasions that I'd never felt anything like that before. Chances are I won't be in a position to afford an antibody test, nor will my DM, so we'll never know if that was covid or not.

I had a lot of throat weirdness as well. I used to suffer laryngitis and throat infections a lot but this was different. Even now it’s still croaky quite often

I think I may have had it at the end of November. Though could have been flu, but the symptoms fit Covid more than the flu. I also managed to give it to at least 4 people in the space of just a few hours (went to the pub, thought I was just coming down with a cold at that point).

The hospitals in my city went on black alert around the same time as had a big influx of patients with flu or pneumonia.

I’m going to get an antibody test when prices come down. Though as people have said, if it’s positive it could be because I’ve had it asymptomatically.

One theory to add to why a higher proportion of deaths is the treatment for covid-19. We were told early on that China were treating people using ventilation, so we all followed suit. I’ve seen a few articles since from doctors which say that ventilation isn’t necessary for everybody, and that supplying oxygen is more important in a lot of cases.

I’ve also seen an article floating about recently that another country has been looking at lung xrays taken over the winter period and have found a few that look like typical C19. Will try and dig it out.

The pre March deaths/illnesses could have been put down to flu. Technically we should have had less flu cases than usual as we didn't have a very cold winter. It was certainly the warmest winter I've seen in a long time as it usually hits around -5 here most early mornings but it never really went below 0. My windscreen wasn't frozen over as much as there was barely any snow. Flu survives better indoors in the winter due to the cold and dry air.

If we take a look at the flu deaths for winter 2018-2019 then 2019-2020, how do they compare? Was there more in the latter even though there should have been less? What was the state of ICU admissions between the two? Also, can you catch and incubate flu or a cold and coronavirus at the same time? Because if you can't, many people may have not caught coronavirus due to having one of the other viruses at the time of being exposed to coronavirus. For example, if you have the common cold virus, does that attack coronavirus or what happens?

It seems unlikely that cases broke out in Wuhan in December and it never reached the UK until the end of January. It was most probably here but we just didn't know what it was (thanks China) and if you don't know there's a new virus spreading and it has similar symptoms to other virues, then you just assume that it's another known virus. We don't test people for colds and flu do we? Doctors can just say 'you have the flu' or 'you have the cold' based on your symptoms?

I think it might have been around since last autumn tbh.

I read an article stating there was a high death rate of what was put down to pneumonia/flu in November, which is early for flu season tbh.

Sorry post too early!!

So potentially what we just witnessed wasn't the first wave, it was the second.

If I get ill with a cold (which I get without fail at least once per year) It really affects me and tends to linger.

With this illness I got ill then a few days later I surprised myself by getting better. Never ever happened before. I thought I must have zooped up my immune system and my body was fighting it but then it came back with a vengeance between Christmas and New Year.

I can’t remember exact dates but I was very ill nearly all through January.
At some point for a few days I couldn’t sleep because if I went to sleep i would have found it difficult to breathe without being able to concentrate on taking breaths.

My chest was wheezing as I was fighting for every breath.

By mid February I had got over most of the symptoms but I was exhausted.
I normally think nothing of walking several miles each day. But I found myself sitting in my car trying and failing to get the energy to go into a shop about 100/200metres away

I would say I felt a little back to normal in March but that was only after I had, had some help/therapy with my breathing.

Even now I wouldn’t say I was 100%