Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

anecdotally lots of 70+ retirees here (uk) socialising as usual. shopping, coffee, seeing friends, garden centre, public transport. ffs

my 10 year old nephew came down with a high temperature and a cough last night. he's one of four kids, one of whom has downs syndrome. they live a five minute walk away from my mum and dad. they've all been seeing each other until my parents went into lockdown yesterday. troubling news.

he would be the only kid in the world to my knowledge with the virus who also displays symptoms. i think it's very very unlikely.

Is that true? Great news if so! Hoping he's just got the regular lurgy, not the special one.

Coronavirus and kids:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/coronavirus-kids-children-symptoms-research_l_5e701c39c5b63c3b64835739

Roughly 4% of the children had no symptoms at all and 51% had mild illness — meaning symptoms like fever, sore throat, coughing, sneezing or digestive issues.

Another 39% had what researchers considered moderate illness, including pneumonia, more frequent fever and cough, or wheezing.

whaa - that totally contradicts what I've heard

guess we'll find out for sure sooner or later :(

Not all cases were confirmed through lab testing, and severe outcomes were more common in kids who were not specifically tested for COVID-19, which could be because their symptoms were caused by other pathogens.

hmmmm??

The study may also underestimate the number of children who are asymptomatic carriers, as it focused primarily on those who presented with symptoms, O’Leary said.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah kids w/o symptoms aren't being tested unless presumably they've been in overwhelming contact with a confirmed case

but confirmed cases won't have been tested and confirmed until they've been in contact with a confirmed case
etc

yeah seems like the answer to a lot of this is 'more testing please' not less

It's the thing I'm finding most frustrating tbh
Lack of accurate data for anyone to make decisions
I completely understand the NHS isn't adequately funded or able to provide testing. But when I've expressed frustration about it I hear people say 'well they need to focus on healthcare not filling in forms/testing when most people are likely to not have it'. Again I get it but routine testing would clarify a lot.

I fully expect that lots of people are seeing there's only e.g. 3 confirmed cases in their whole county, and acting as if there's no risk.

good luck NickB - and yes, please govt(s) please ramp up the testing

someone from my team who works with me on a couple of projects is off sick now, no news as to what with except "feeling really run down" - reminding myself that there are a lot of other reasons to feel "run down", not least the uncertainty. it's probably not The Bug of course

this might be a bit nuts but I don't even know if I should be sending my mother a mother's day card, let alone anything to go with :/

(PS non-Britishers, don't panic, your Mother's Day is probably not until May)

yeah, I thought my parents were in a relatively safe place because until the weekend the cases by county map had their county at 0, but they're right by the border and a neighbour's kid goes to school in a town which had several early confirmed cases and they think that whole family probably has it

but that family can't get tested and nor can anyone else, so the case map by county still says just 1 or 2

Posting stuff will be fine I think, he said hopefully. Least we don't have to lick the stamps anymore

I bought a card with a cool little cellophane window in but card/paper will harbour fewer bugs than cellophane so maybe I'll buy a new one (or better still, find one in my existing card stash, even if it probably won't say anything about Mother's Day) or maybe I'll just try to be less nuts

(I say "will", I mean "I read an article which I was way too dumb to understand and came to this probably half-baked confusion" obv)

a local person died here who had tested positive for cv, but I feel bad for wanting to know if this person is a statistic in our county or the neighbouring one where he died in hospital.

My uncle is in dire need of a hip replacement, which is supposed to happen in 3 weeks, and he's worried it will be delayed.

my mom is in this same situation with a knee replacement, although i’m not clear on exactly how dire. tbh it doesn’t seem like a great time for a septuagenarian to go to a hospital unless absolutely necessary

yeah my sister and I had to badger my mom into canceling her knee replacement scheduled for today.

She refused for a week+ and now gets it, is glad she's not going in despite being in terrible pain and having tremendous difficulty walking

My brother's had flu-like fever for a couple of days, I'm pretty sure it's COVID. He's got a youngun - I know "kids" aren't at risk but are babies? I keep worrying.

there have been virtually no deaths of people under 10 iirc, as the father of a 21-month-old the extremely limited effect on children so far is one of the main things keeping me sane

It doesn't seem to be affecting babies much? I dunno, my sister had a baby last week after just eight months. Terrified by the fragility of it all but she seems to be doing well and they're self-isolating in any case. And it's probably a good thing it happened early, can't imagine what it would be like to be in the last month of pregnancy and watching the various updates knowing you need to go into hospital just as this thing approaches its peak.

No one knows until they start testing everyone, like that small Italian town apparently did, but I suspect many, many people - kids, adults, everyone - have this or had this and are asymptomatic or barely symptomatic and transmitting it. Certainly if this did start circulating in the middle of cold and flu season (which it did) there had to have been plenty of people who thought they had common colds and flus but may have had this and just didn't know it yet, or didn't even know they *could* have had it. For example, a few weeks back my older daughter amp back from a trip and got a random fever that lasted a couple of days. Not really any other symptoms. She missed a day of school, but quickly got better. Could that have been it? A few days after she recovered my other daughter got what appeared to be a cold - stuffy nose, cough. That also lasted a couple of days, and then she got better. A few days after *that* I caught a cold which I assumed was her cold, and started getting mild symptoms in sequence - stuffy nose, fatigue, sore throat. Could *that* have been it? Without testing, I'd never know.

In fact, I bet it's been spreading for a lot longer than people first thought, and those "patient one", "patient two" people, the first to test positive (in this country, at least) were not the first to have it in this country, just the first to get sick and tested. The potential bright side of this, if it were true, is that infection rates would gradually slow as more and more people get it and gain some form of immunity. Isolation or quarantine would only speed this process up. But of course the only way to know for sure is if everyone got tested.

I had a sore throat, cough and fatigue for a few days about three weeks ago but I'm still of the opinion that was another bug going round rather than this. Until we have reliable and widely accessible antibody tests it's going to be impossible for people to really do anything unless they've unequivocally had it.

best wishes to emil.y's brother and youngun

It absolutely has been more widespread than even blanket testing in China/Korea suggests, the micro study in Vo’ was very clear on this. Makes it far more difficult if people have never had symptoms.

I think it's good to assume anything from several weeks ago was a different illness unless you're given a test to see if you have antibodies specific to covid-19. I've already heard some "well, I think I may have already had it, so I'm not too worried" statements and that's a very dangerous stance

That's for sure. But good luck getting a test (here) just to check and see if you had it a few weeks ago, which would be useful to know the longer we are stuck inside.

there have been virtually no deaths of people under 10 iirc

no deaths of anyone under 14yo total from what i saw. makes it feel practically biblical.

The focus on deaths makes us overlook how many people still get very sick and need to be hospitalized. Have there been any/many cases of people under 10 getting very sick?

no deaths of anyone under 14yo total from what i saw. makes it feel practically biblical.

― Mordy

in the bible they were really into killing children, i was thinking more "logan's run"

xp there have been some critical cases but very tiny % (especially compared to all other age groups)

xpost Kid Nation!

https://tv.avclub.com/bonanza-city-revisited-the-pioneers-of-kid-nation-rem-1842153606

no deaths of anyone under 14yo total from what i saw. makes it feel practically biblical.

Or like a YA novel

potato, potahto

I think it's good to assume anything from several weeks ago was a different illness unless you're given a test to see if you have antibodies specific to covid-19. I've already heard some "well, I think I may have already had it, so I'm not too worried" statements and that's a very dangerous stance

otm

I didn't mean to imply you *could* get tested for such a thing, meaning you absolutely should assume you're both able to catch it and possibly contagious

At the same time, it's probably safe to assume we're all going to get it some time in the next ... several months. Year? Which is why it's vital to ramp up testing (duh) of everyone, so that anyone that *has* had it and has recovered can get out in the world and help with much less fear for self or others.

idk if it has been mentioned here but the blood banks are getting hammered as well

― sleeve, Wednesday, March 18, 2020 12:48 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

haven't been able to find any blood drives that would be near me on a normal day, let alone one without public transportation (if my hemoglobin levels are even ok)

Many hospitals have their own blood banking facilities on site. So if you have any hospitals near you, they might be worth checking out.

I wonder if they are having issues testing blood before they can use it too.

At the same time, it's probably safe to assume we're all going to get it some time in the next ... several months. Year? Which is why it's vital to ramp up testing (duh) of everyone, so that anyone that *has* had it and has recovered can get out in the world and help with much less fear for self or others.

― Josh in Chicago

except that we don't actually know if having it gives you immunity, or if like the flu this will come back in a new form to which nobody is immune next year :(

wondering idly if they're going to relax the restrictions on queer people giving blood anytime soon.

I had the flu earlier in the year, but it seems silly to me to speculate that this strain of coronavirus was already here then.

Thanks for the reassurance about kids, everyone, it is far too easy to fall into panic mode.

Related to posts above (probably already been posted, can't keep up):

http://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread/index.html

Gut tells me a) this is terrible in terms of containing it, and b) maybe encouraging in terms of its fatality, but c) I can't make sense of any of this anymore, so that's probably wrong. If nothing else, a) hastens the hospital crisis.

Katherine in the US, the MSM blood donation deferral was recently relaxed from “no donations if you’re a man who had sex with a man since 197x” or whatever to “no donations for a year after M/M sex”, which is still arbitrary, punitive, and pointless, but i guess gives hope that the restriction will be lifted entirely sometime

Oh sorry I can’t do brains. Posting @ Kate not Katherine

I will try to give blood soon, but lately my bloodstream is mostly weed, bourbon, and ice cream

my main concern is whether or not blood donation organizations are allowed to acknowledge me as my legal gender (which is in fact "x") as opposed to my AGAB

except that we don't actually know if having it gives you immunity, or if like the flu this will come back in a new form to which nobody is immune next year :(

from this CNN article:

Still, a common perception is that the continuous acquisition of mutations will cause our future coronavirus vaccines to be ineffective. While virus evolution may confer vaccine resistance, this process often takes many years for the right mutations to accumulate. Many vaccines to RNA viruses, such as yellow fever, measles, and mumps, were developed throughout the 1930s-70s and are all still highly effective. And those viruses mutate at rates as fast or faster than coronaviruses. In fact, the two proposed "S" and "L" coronavirus strains only differ by two mutations and are 99.993% identical. It's extremely likely that any vaccine designed for one coronavirus will be protective against the other. The reason we need an annual influenza vaccine has more to do with how that virus reshuffles its genome than how it mutates.