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

I mean distance does often dilute the impact of aerosolized virus (meaning lower, but still some risk), but I've seen virologists and aerosol experts threaten each other's families over this concept so idk.

i'm sealed in a bubble rn

Just got the news that my 82 year old Mom who lives in a memory care facility in Indianapolis has tested positive, along with many other residents and staff. Double Moderna vaxxed and we think boosted (permission given but weren't notified when it was administered).

Oh Jaq, that’s not news anyone would want to hear. Hope it’s mild and she recovers quickly.

Same, Jaq. ❤️

ugh Jaq

Thanks folks - I had resigned myself that she would no doubt catch this and all we could do was hope for mild symptoms. Sucks being so far away.

aww shit Jaq. echoing everybody's sentiments - hoping for a mild case and that all is well. terrible to be at a distance at a time like this :(

jaq <3 im so sorry

Posted this on the other thread yesterday:

Almost a week ago, I came down with a sore throat and cough. For two days in a row, my at-home (nasal swab) test was negative, so I figured it was just a cold. I've mostly shaken those symptoms, but now I'm super-congested and have a weird bitter taste in my mouth. Of course, it could still be a cold, but given that my wife just had COVID, it wouldn't be crazy that I would have it now, too.

― jaymc, Tuesday, January 4, 2022 8:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

So I decided to take another at-home rapid test, and...now it's positive. I guess I'm not too surprised. But I do find it interesting that both my wife and I tested negative even after experiencing symptoms. (I actually misremembered when I posted yesterday: I tested negative only once, not twice, after developing the scratchy throat, but it was at least 36 hours into it.)

On one hand, it feels weirdly significant that COVID finally caught me after trying my best to avoid it for so long. (On the whole, I think I've been more cautious than most people I know.)

On the other, the illness itself has been mostly a mild nuisance. I've been working full days this week (at home) and feel a little run-down and stuffed up but it otherwise hasn't affected me much. In terms of energy, the booster hit me harder (though for a shorter period of time).

And testing positive won't really change my day-to-day. Since my wife just recovered from it, we don't need to isolate from one another. And I wasn't really planning to leave the house much anyhow, given the cold weather here in Chicago.

So, hopefully I just have to wait it out for a few more days.

Huh that's interesting jaymc because it corroborates* what someone else told me today, that a lot of people he knows didn't test positive until day 9.

I had the same symptoms, PCR tested on day 5 and it came back negative, so I assumed it was a cold. A lot of other people I know a lot of other people with cold symptoms who tested negative in the first week as well.

*this is not medical advice, just comparing anecdotes, etc etc

it's like Mr Blonde said

either you got Omicron
or you got a cold
or you're sick
or you're not

My wife tested positive on a rapid test at a clinic on Tuesday, but tested negative on a rapid test at home yesterday. She has no symptoms at all, feels totally fine, so is of the mind that the positive was perhaps not a sure-thing, but is continuing to isolate until the five day mark, which I think is Sunday. We're still waiting on PCR results, which should be today or tomorrow or so, and of course if they come back positive for any of us we'll adjust expectations accordingly, but a bigger flag would be if any of us symptom-free folks started getting symptoms.

My other daughter, the one whose exposure and subsequent positive test started all this, definitely has cold-like symptoms: stuffy nose, low fever, headache, occasional cough, thankfully pretty mild, though as far as school goes she's stuck at home until the end of next week no matter what. We feel pretty bad for her, but it's a lesson learned. She's pretty sure who she caught it from, a friend at her New Year's sleepover. Everyone was supposed to get a negative test beforehand, and indeed this friend did get a negative test ... but apparently a *week* beforehand! Not only did she likely get my daughter sick and another kid there sick, but apparently she went to a *second* sleepover the next night with someone who is immunocompromised, not only scaring the shit out of their parents but probably scuttling that person's older sister's already modest birthday celebration this coming weekend. My daughter is pretty pissed that this person hasn't even apologized. I don't want my kids to learn the wrong thing about trust, but we've told them from the start how precarious it gets the minute they (or we) start hanging out with friends with anything less than full masks and distancing. If each of us is a family of four, unless everyone is fully accounted for and cautious, one misstep can quickly have exponential ramifications. And with all due respect to kids, if even teenagers have to be occasionally reminded to take showers, god only knows how consistent they are with covid mitigations.

BTW, there is no more surefire way to make you suspect you are ill then to have someone close to you test positive and then wait around for symptoms that may or may not arrive. Magnifies every last thing that could be wrong in your body. Wake up with a stuffy nose? Covid! It clears up but you have a catch in your throat? Covid! Feel tired? Covid!

i've had random moments of a sneeze being on deck that has made me want to speed at 90 mph through traffic screaming "COVID, I HAVE COVID, GET OUT OF MY WAY, MOVE, THIS IS NOT A DRILL".

(in reality though I still have no symptoms post-exposure, 5 days now - which was the old incubation period, which is now apparently 3 days with Omicron)

Kid tested positive on Tuesday after an exposure on Friday night/Saturday morning. Today what few mild symptoms she had (cold, congestion, very low fever, headache) are mostly gone. The rest of us have yet to show any symptoms at all, and my wife (who had one positive rapid test and one negative) is pretty confident she does not have it. Still, we're being relatively cautious and all more or less keeping apart until Sunday, at which point we'll test again. And the one that tested positive will still have to stay at home next week and wear a mask around the house.

Still waiting on our Tuesday PCRs, btw, but a lot of good they will do us at this point.

six days after my exposure, not a symptom, and yet another negative test. appears I got lucky.

'grats Neanderthal!

Solidarity with everyone here.

I'm a few days away from '12 weeks since positive' and I'm still not right (where still not right = ongoing headaches and exhaustion). I had a few days over Christmas where I figured I was on the mend and did some long-ish walks. All good. Then Monday of this week I felt like shit again - to the point where I'm on a staggered return to work this term. I'm sure some of this is bound up with doubts about my job but there are days when I can't manage much more than a jigsaw puzzle, let alone looking after 25 14yr olds. I'm fucking sick of it, to be honest.

i’m sorry Chinaski, that sucks :( the effects are so weird and unpredictable

solidarity and aloha! here's wishing you well with my whole heart <3

same!

I hope the lingering effects resolve for you soon Chinaski.

there was an interesting chart i saw on twitter, so many long covid symptoms...

A very cool graph showing the average *onset* of these #LongCovid symptoms. 5/ pic.twitter.com/otoDqTp257

— Hannah Davis (ON HIATUS FOR JANUARY) (@ahandvanish) December 27, 2020

Well, that's cheered me up! Especially the use of TIE fighters.

Thanks for the well wishes folks. I'll kick this fucker in the end.

Tested myself again with a rapid antigen test and I'm still positive (not too surprising because my mild symptoms haven't yet cleared up) ... but the test line on the faint this time. Everything I've read says to treat any visible line, no matter how faint, as evidence of COVID. But does a fainter line mean that there are lower levels of the virus, i.e., that I am becoming less contagious? Or is it just a quirk of the tests that the line can vary in visibility?

*test line is faint

That's good question. We took my daughter's rapidly positive rapid test and the very obvious line as further proof that the results were accurate. (She tested positive again today, btw, four days after the first test, though her symptoms are even slighter.)

My wife tested negative for the second time at home, which combined with a total lack of symptoms makes her think the first shipping container clinic test was perhaps not accurate. Rest of us continue to test negative.

Meanwhile, that crazy litany of long covid symptoms, I wonder if the (self-reported?) results would be different today vs. Dec. 2020? Regardless:

On reproductive health in #LongCovid - I won't repeat everything but a few new datapoints:

15% of men reported sexual dysfunction. 11% of cis men and 3% of nonbinary respondents reported pain in testicles. 3% of cis men reported a decrease in genital size. 17/

— Hannah Davis (ON HIATUS FOR JANUARY) (@ahandvanish) December 27, 2020

3% of cis men reported a decrease in genital size? I don't doubt that some people reported it, but even humoring stats like this is not how you gain faith in the methodology and results.

my luck finally ran out

oh no!

how do you feel?

scratchy throat, that's it.

sealing myself in my room to avoid contact with parents. fortunately they're boosted and I caught this early (PCR test positive, antigen test negative).

just in time for dad's 74th birthday. meh.

dude!!!! that sucks, i’m sorry.

Ugh, sorry. So many friends have had this experience during Omicron, dodged it for two years and then bleah. Good thing is they've all been vaxxed, mostly boosted, and as far as I know nobody's had anything worse than a few flu-like days. Hang in there.

Hope it’s mild, Neanderthal.

My experience, just as Tipsy describes.

I'm fully vaxxed, came down with a bad head cold about 12 days ago, my wife who was feeling rough too got pinged by the app about 5 days later and we've been isolating.

It's not been too bad, I guess, I work from home so I've been able to keep working. Started as a head cold, then got my throat pretty bad then wheezy chest stuff. My main problem has been lack of sleep, most people I talk to say they slept for 4 days straight, I wish, 4 hours a night max for about 10 days now.

Tested myself again this morning, still got it, was hoping I'd be clear so I could test again tomorrow and return to the wild, feeling very sorry for myself :)

imo any virus that infects Neanderthal two years into uprooting his entire life to try and protect his parents from it is a bad guy

had it - chills, fever, crampy lungs for a week, weakness for two. lingering asthmatic throat since

Sorry all, hang in there.

Sending good thoughts to everyone, ride it out safely people!

Best wishes to everyone currently suffering from this - hope it's mild and you feel better soon with no lingering effects!

Sorry Neanderthal, hope your parents stay safe (and the same to anyone else living with/afraid for their loved ones), though I'm hopeful they will since you caught it early and I know a good few people who didn't catch it when those they live with were stricken.

had it, mostly just felt like a bad cold for a week, feel nearly totally better now except for this cough that will not fucking go away arrghhh

still no symptoms other than scratchy throat. like my friend who got it, my voice changed a bit yesterday.

however my throat kinda feels better today. not normal or 'good' per se, but I just tried quietly humming the falsetto to "After the Love is Gone" and did so without issue, which i wouldn't usually be able to do with a sore throat even.

no fever still.

i loaded up on rapid tests for the folks. mom tested negative yesterday (I told her it was too soon to test, but she insisted), but we'll retry every so often.

the Philip Bailey Test

my voice changed a bit yesterday.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RMvsEuT7gnU/hqdefault.jpg

lolz x 2

well, now this is fun.

tomorrow, I have to go in for my study and get officially tested there, as part of my original agreement.

I decided to confirm yesterday's result by going to a rapid PCR place. it was also self-collected, and I did it the same way I collected my result yesterday that was positive.

results....negative.

so now....is that test wrong? was the first one false positive?

now I gotta go in tomorrow and get it done a third time at my study, where they will collect sample. if that's negative, then maybe it is a false positive.

until then, not changing anything I'm doing. meh. this is annoying.

also going to keep an eye on the folks, so far they seem fine, but it's been short while.

and yeah, it doesn't matter if I'm taking precautions either way, but I would like to know definitively if I had it or not, as that has a bearing of my likelihood of immediate risk in the near future. antibody tests are good for that, i ain't taking one right now though.

went to my COVID study and got swabbed, but they told me results could take 3 days to a week. by then, they'll be useless to me. they're also having me do saliva tests, which don't start until the 19th.

I went to another facility and had another rapid PCR done (the Mesa-Accula, one of the best out there), and once again, negative. have also done about four rapids timed 12 hours apart over the last few days, also negative (and they should have started popping positive by now if PCR popped positive Tuesday at 9 am).

so what I have now is a likelihood that it was a false positive, esp since I feel normal, and the scratchy throat was probably the byproduct of drinking a lot for two days, yelling at the tv during the super bowl, and not hydrating. but....who knows. i'm staying cautious for at least one more day, might take one more rapid at midnight and then talk to the fam.

folks have been testing, negative so far all times. but that could also be due to our isolation working.

i hate this!

Hang in there, Neanderthal. At worst it's the mildest of cases; at best you'll be rarin' to go in 24 hours.

Look at it this way, if you are positive then you're in the clear for a few months! And if you're negative, you've still got a shot at getting it! It's a win-win!

So I've had quite the journey the last few days, physically and psychologically. Backstory: Last weekend I was a parent chaperone on a middle-school band trip to Disney World. I KNOW. An insane thing to do even under ideal circumstances, even more so in a waning but still present Omicron wave. I was admittedly lax about masking, mostly because so was everybody else, I admit it. Disney required masks on their buses, but that was it, so for three days it was just wall to wall mostly unmasked people, indoors and out. I of course had trepidations about this, but my kid had lobbied me to go last fall and I had agreed (and paid a whole lot of upfront money), so I just figured, what the hell. I'm vaxxed/boosted, this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime "worth getting COVID for" things.

So. The trip was ... I mean, kind of a nightmare, as you would expect, but overall the kids had fun and the grown-ups more or less did too, and we were all totally exhausted by the end. My son and I got home Sunday night. Monday, I started experiencing fairly severe intestinal upset. My first thought was that I'd picked up either food poisoning or a norovirus, if that gives you an idea of the symptoms. As it went on, I figured I should go ahead and do a rapid test, since such symptoms are also a fairly common COVID onset indicator. It was negative. From what I read, it's common for those particular symptoms to be followed by fever about a day later. Tuesday morning, still suffering, I went and did a PCR test, and also took another rapid test. The rapid test was again negative. By Tuesday afternoon I started feeling a teensy bit better and thinking that it probably wasn't COVID — and then BAM, out of nowhere, I got hit by severe shaking chills and fever. My temperature jumped from 99 to 101 in 20 minutes. Miserable. My wife and I went into total lockdown, she moved out onto the couch, we started masking whenever she came into the bedroom to check on me. Fever spiked to 102 before gradually subsiding through the night. At this point, I was 100 percent sure I had COVID, and in my feverish state started running through all kinds of thoughts and feelings about the whole situation.

This morning, temp continued to fall until it was normal by midday. Stomach is still funky but recovering. But I was still waiting on the PCR that I knew was going to be positive, and figuring I had at least 3-4 more days of lockdown ahead. BUT. The PCR results arrived late this afternoon and — it was also negative (for both COVID and flu). So now, after having basically accepting that I had COVID and also thinking that I was getting over it — and also would have some more immunity to it — it appears I don't have it at all. I have some other damn Florida nastiness. Swamp flu or alligator pox or what have you. Of course, at Disney I would have been exposed to any number of things from any number of places. Plus also it could still be food poisoning.

I don't know. I'm still pretty beat, probably need at least one more day in bed before I'll be functional. But now I'm having to adjust to NOT having COVID. Sort of pisses me off tbh — if I'm going to be this sick, I ought to at least get some useful immunity from it. It's a weird headspace to be in. (And I know this is the thread for people who actually have COVID, so I apologize, but it's been quite an experience overall.)