rona moved in: ilx0rs with the bug report on their progress

It lives for 72 hours on surfaces - I think it’s much more likely anyone gets it from absentmindedly touching something or cross-contaminating their gloves than talking to somebody two metres away who isn’t sneezing, coughing or furiously spraying saliva while they speak. I came down with it at the same time as Stet, btw, but very mildly and it was gone in a week. Maybe his viral load was greater than mine, maybe it’s because he’s a man, or maybe it was just bad luck. But thank goodness one of us was well enough to deal with our energetic six-year-old, particularly when *he* came down with chickenpox. Props to parents managing childcare and bad rona at the same time.

was going to ask how you were, M! and F. I genuinely don't know what we'll do if we both get it even moderately - the kids will go feral...

Oh god, and pox too?! before all this kicked off I was going to try and see if my 2yo could get poxed before I think about going back to work...

Screen limits went out the window, obviously :D

Yipes re Stet and Madchen -- glad you're both through it, more or less.

Potential surface transmission is one area where I'm not doing all that I should. I have a routine worked out when I bring back groceries where I put everything away, wash up, and then--since I'm usually buying in advance--try not to use those items for two or three days. But I'm sure I've lapsed there.

for real, unless you have had exactly one moment of outside human contact in the last two weeks, it's nearly impossible to figure out

I've yet to have an unbroken two week stretch -- it was two weeks between grocery store visits, but I've had carry-out dropped on my front porch twice in the last couple weeks. very careful with packaging, putting food in new containers, etc. but unless I keep completely to myself for more than a couple weeks it could be any point of contact

<3 to stet, Madchen and Tracer.

Saturday 4 April - Friday 10 April
That stonking headache appears to have been the parting gift from Covid-19. The last lash of the Balrog's whip. Since then I've felt progressively better each day. When I made bread the other day i actually smelled it baking, which was wonderful. Coffee tastes better. And tonight I had a beer for the first time in two weeks. Well, a few sips. The entire beer felt extraordinarily large.

The lovely Emma B was real bad, though. High fever and flattened. We hear a lot about 'Day 10' and that was the day it happened to her. I had never seen her as bad. Unable to get out of bed. Flushed and hot. Zero appetite. I was scared. She was scared. We were trying not to show it. And that remorseless headache I mentioned, the one that moves in like some kind of military hardware and parks its extensible grips right into you - she got it too. And it didn't let up for three days.

Finally, yesterday, she had no fever. At all. We'd booked an appointment at a GP surgery in Stratford that's doubling as a COVID clinic. We walked down there with our masks and gloves etc and hung around on a side street, like the text she'd gotten had instructed. We called them. They said they'd be right out. We were standing right in front of the entrance to an apartment building. People kept going past us. I had to think I wouldn't like living there. All the COVID patients just hanging about like junkies! Finally a couple of nurses came out in derisory PPE equipment - it looked like they had half a white bin bag each - and gave Emma a blog oxygen test and a lung capacity test, right there on the pavement. She passed them both with flying colours. That was the best I'd felt in a long while. We hugged for a long time.

This morning, unexpectedly, she vomited. She didn't see it coming at all. She feels fine now and her appetite's back. Still no fever. But it was alarming.

This week we've watched:

- Hot Shots
- The Naked Gun
- Just Boys (6 part series on iPlayer)
- War Games
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- and me and Emma have watched about 10 episodes of Cheers.

The boys want to be either professional filmmakers or professional ping pong players. They alternate. They're using a terrible programme called HitFilm, written in Java I'm pretty sure, it regularly slows the machine to a crawl or crashes it.

All the ping pong tables near us have closed.

Our lives have become very repetitive. A bit of schoolwork in the morning, games and videos until lunch, then various remote lessons - piano, French - or talking with a grandparent. Then getting outside for exercise. Then back home for dinner and a movie. We're lucky that we have a back garden. But we're starting to feel a little loopy. The biggest thing though, obviously, is that we're getting better.

Excellent.

wow. So glad to hear you're on the up. That must have been a scary time. You might have said already but were you taking anything (and did it help)?

Fantastic to hear

Also good luck to the gazaraos, stet, madchen and all

I say tomorrow night we all stand by our doors and applaud Tracer ... and the missus.

We were taking paracetemol (acetominophin) at max amounts every day, that’s it. I haven’t had any in days, and Emma stopped today.

It’s worth saying we both still feel dehydrated all the time. I certainly don’t feel like running or working out anytime soon. It’s taken a bit of a toll.

I’ll keep an ear out Tom :)

Thanks for all the love! <3. I don't know how I got it, but the week before I got it I was really only at work, so I'm guessing it's from there somehow. Was washing hands and being cautious, but apparently not enough.

I forgot to even mention the headaches, wow. And the upset stomach on the way in. That day 10 thing is weird but definitely real – it was a bastard.

One reason I hope this stuff might be useful is just to give people something to judge against if it happens to them. A few nights in when it was getting unpleasant I found it really useful to read other people's experiences on Twitter and see that what I was going through was relatively "normal" for a moderate CV and probably not worth having a panic attack over.

xp yeah easy on the working out. I took F for a gentle 40-minute walk on Wednesday and when I got home I felt like I'd done a massive workout. Went straight back to bed.

Great entries, much thanks.

Stet is the man

I had a bug in early March which I wonder if was it. On 7 March I came down with a fever, upset stomach, and intermittent fatigue where I felt on the verge of nodding out in the afternoons (quite unusual for me). After a few days of this, I developed a scratchy throat, where I felt the need to keep clearing my throat and had a rough voice - but never developed a cough. I recovered from the fever in about a week, and checked the 111 online site very carefully and went through a questionnaire which told me I didn't need to quarantine myself as I didn't have the symptoms of C19 (which in retrospect seems mad) . The unusual bit is the general loss of stamina which persisted for some weeks after, and I've still got a slightly scratchy throat even now.

If it was Covid 19, with its 5-7 day incubation period the most likely place I caught it is on a very packed train from Oxford to London, filled with the weekend Bicester Village visitors.

What freaks me out a bit is the memory that this weekend (7/8 March) was when the awareness of the real threat of C19 impinged on me, and things started to seem very scary and out of control - and I may already have caught it.

Great to hear Tracer, Emma, Madchen on the mend..

Love to all our ILXoronas and thank you for sharing your experiences.

One reason I hope this stuff might be useful is just to give people something to judge against if it happens to them. A few nights in when it was getting unpleasant I found it really useful to read other people's experiences on Twitter and see that what I was going through was relatively "normal" for a moderate CV and probably not worth having a panic attack over.

we need an epithet for ilx covid survivors

case hardened?

poxy fules

Sonned a virus in a rona beef

aka beefarona

emma b: lovely-haired (καλλιπλόκαμος kalliplókamos)

madchen: beautiful-cheeked (καλλιπάρῃος kallipárēios)

stet: conductor of men (διάκτορος diáktoros)

tracer hand: man of twists and turns (πολύ-τροπος polú-tropos)

mrs g: bright-eyed (γλαυκ-ῶπις)

someone was saying stevie had it too?

Haha I love that you included me in the list (and thanks for all the wishes) but when I said it was very mild and gone in a week, I meant it was like a cold with a bit of extra fatigue. The only reason I think I had it was I came down with it at exactly the same time as Stet, with the same symptoms, but I had it at about 5% strength. For which I am very grateful.

exillors

stet when do you feel like you can go to the shops? i don’t have major symptoms any more so according to the NHS 111 website i can go, but it feels.. weird? i really need to though. grocery delivery in london is literally impossible. we’ve been leaning on friends but they have been rubbish at actually reading what’s on our list and actually getting that thing. no, alpro coconut-apricot yogurt is not the same as “plain yogurt”.

they evidently use the ocado substitutes app

and stevie himself said he had it (or assumed he had)

Having been in a supermarket a few days ago the last thing I wanted to do was stand over a metallic fridge with other people looming over it for too long (people wearing gloves FFS and completely failing to respect other people's personal space). You probably have to take into account that "get the fuck out of this shop as quickly as possible" is very high on people's priority list.

I dunno if this is the same all over London right now but Sainsbury's delivery slots appear to be freeing up a bit more?

Grocery deliveries from not-supermarkets seem like they are more possible? We were in receipt of a massive box of vegetables this morning (ordered from some local firm on Thursday IIRC) which will keep us going for a week at least. And our local butcher is doing decent looking boxes of meat, though we've a freezerful to work through before we start doing that.

so is there somewhere you can check in to find what local non-supermarket places do deliveries? i only know the names (and sometimes only the locations) of the ones quite nearby, which mostly don't so far

I hate to say it, because Facebook neighborhood groups are the worst thing ever, but such local fb groups might actually be good for finding that kind of thing, if you have a decent-sized one for wherever you live and can stomach searching through the curtain-twitching and worse. The big group for my local area has had some good tips lately amidst all the usual nonsense.

I've seen a couple of sites covering South London, which as we know is the important bit. This one's a blog I follow anyway and seems to do some of the job. I don't know if there's a more authoritative single source: https://www.rocketandsquash.com/eating-in-in-the-time-of-covid-19-ingredient-shopping/

ok i might try asking my local whatsapp group, which is much less awful than the FB groups seem to be -- it's heavy on info to help the vulnerable* and so far very light on performative crackpot stasi beef

*i am not really in a vulnerable group (until my birthday lol) but i guess the info would generally be helpful

We got a massive double fruit/veg box plus milk, bread, eggs and butter from Knock Knock. Quality was decent, if not the stuff I’d usually have chosen. For anyone in the Peckham area, Khan’s on Rye Lane are doing deliveries.

Bizarrely, jaguarshoes - next day delivery, we ordered after the cut off last night and it still turned up at 2pm today - they even made a second delivery last week to drop off the bread they forgot in the first one:

https://jaguarshoescollective.bigcartel.com/

jaguar shoes? Were you ordering negronis??

The advice is that seven days after the fever goes you're safe, but since I never had a fever it's shruggy-emoji time for me. I've been out to a shop once and was almost phobically distanced all the time I was there. Madchen is working on masks; will feel a lot happier when I have one of those on.

there seems to be confusion about this. I’ve heard both from a person on the NHS 111 service as well as from the nurses that gave Emma her blood oxygen tests that it’s 7 days from when you first got symptoms, and after that, if you don’t have symptoms, you no longer need to self-isolate. they are vague about this on the official page:


https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/self-isolation-advice/

FWIW, on this side of the pond the CDC advises people to stay home for 72 hours after fever has disappeared and when all other symptoms (shortness of breath, cough) have also disappeared.

What do the Taiwanese health services say? I'd follow their advice, personally.

tracer i dug up some delivery possibilities (i have tried none of these but various friends suggested them inc.mr farrell above -- some are uk-wide but we think most shd cover yr part of east london?) (crossposted on the "bring me soup mfers" london quarantine distress thread also):

Crosstown
Dishpatch
HG Walter
Jaguar shoes
Natoora
Pale green dot

Aha! mark thank you!!

deliveroo and uber eats were also mentioned in the relevant whatsapp discussion, leading to a squabble abt the respective ethics of using each lol