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

!!! i did not know

Get well sooon, tracer.

Very best wishes to both of you.

i hope you all get well soon xx

the most alarming symptom i’ve heard about so far tbh

― a struggle to make meat-snacking fit (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, March 31, 2020 8:17 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well loss of taste is a common symptom

roasted

lol

a+

I mention this just to cheer you up, Tracer Hand (hoping you find humour in such things): I was going to post on that first-ILX-mention thread, so I looked up "coronavirus," and, well, I'm sure you can guess the rest.

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

Huh? Wrong link.

'Professor Wickramasinghe admits there is no hard evidence for his theory; and researchers who have been working on Sars reacted with a mixture of disbelief and ridicule.
There is nothing strange about the Sars coronavirus, they said; it certainly evolved from other known viruses.

One leading expert said Professor Wickramasinghe's letter "must be a joke"; another said it is simply ridiculous.'

surely it is the Professor's name that is the joke here?!@@

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, May 23, 2003 11:59 AM (sixteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

http://www.asiantribune.com/files/images/Chandra1%20-%20Chandra%20Wickramasinghe_0.jpg

Wow!

I am ashamed of making fun of what at this remove I now consider a rather brilliant, grand and gnarly name. :/

Also if that be he, he is clearly A Dude

And he is claiming extraterrestrial origins of coronaviruses to this day.

Unfortunate joke. I was reminded of how, 25-30 years ago, when my friends and I came across someone with an unwieldy name we would exclaim "Gesundheit!" As kids this just seemed silly, but now I have to wonder if it ever came across as racist.

pigs! in! space!

Wednesday 1 April
Best night yet. I didn’t need my emergency paracetemol.

Two massive naps today. Worryingly, Paul comes down with a 103F fever and sleeps for hours as well.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation on the teevee with the kids. Goodness me what a movie. The opera scene. The ‘water torus’ scene. The car chase in Morocco. Kidnaping the Prime Minister. The final cat-and-mouse shootout / knife fight among the foggy alleyways of Tower Hill. The delicious conclusion. Best MI hands down imo.

Appetite still good (though still no sense of smell) and breathing still fine.

Thursday 2 April
Rocky night. However Paul has woken up in a great mood, and no fever.

Went for a longish walk today with the lovaly Emma B. Made avologmeno for lunch and was then attacked by a headache the ferocity of which I have probably never felt before in my life. It wasn’t all-encompassing like a migraine but it somehow felt worse - it was sudden, implacable, vice-like, a heavy boot holding me down. Utterly defenseless. Slept three hours in the afternoon and the boot was still there when I woke up.

Managed to rouse myself for dinner, read to the kids before bed.

In some ways this is maybe the worst day so far. Just flattened. Currently watching Pitch Perfect, which is exactly my speed. Head still throbbing. I’ve heard that people can really take a nose-dive in the second week and I hope this isn’t the beginning of that.

fingers crosse tracer, i hadnt seen migraine as a common symptom but i have where possible just been avoiding too much of that reporting tbh

heartened that yr MI taste is back, that is indeed the best of them

Sorry you’re going through this!

Thanks for keeping everyone informed, I'm sure it's a struggle.

best wishes to you both

Best wishes to you both.

<3 <3 <3 <3

<<<<3333

Damn Tracer, hang in there.

,

fuck, tracer. get well soon. and thanks for keeping us updated here - this sort of thing really helpful (and dare i say it interesting)

Get well soon. Hope it does mean you can't get it again at least.

<3 Tracer all the best to you and family. thanks for posting your updates. what fizzles just said.

Hold tight Tracer. Honestly this sounds like a real motherfucker, something especially cruel about the way it seems to trick everyone into thinking they're improving for a bit before finding new and more horrific ways to brutalise them.

following, and wishing both of you the best

Thanks all. Feeling much better today. 8-y-o’s fever came back in the middle of the night. When I went down for my pee he was calling out that he couldn’t go back to sleep. So I calpol’ed him up and today he’s.... fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sending love; fight through.

Friday 3 April
Last night decided to watch 'View From The Top' (Paltrow, Ruffalo, 2003). A more hallucinatorily bad movie I may have never seen. Everything is so airless and off about it, it's just bananas.

The Lovely Emma B's sleep anxiety has decided to return, which is unhelpful. Paul's fever came back in the night. Some Calpol took care of it.

For the first time in a long time none of us went outside at all. It just felt like too much.

Something I haven't noted yet, but which has ben a feature of the last week, is a ringing in my ears. It's not overwhelming but it's pretty much always there. I notice it particularly in the mornings. Which throws another log on the fire of the feeling that every day I'm somehow paying for Hunter S Thompson's sins. Head pains, metallic taste, burnt out lungs, just a general charred aspect to life. And ringing ears like I've been to a thrash metal show.

Felt pretty okay today. Didn't take any naps. Like an idiot checked work email and found out I'd been taken off a project "indefinitely" that I'd been looking forward to for a long time, and which is one of the main things motivating me to get back in the saddle. Started boiling inside. Instantly fired off about 4 pissed off texts and was reassured pretty much straight away that no, it's a misunderstanding - I'm still on the project. Sometimes you have to throw a strategic stink. I've been watching Larry Sanders. I know how this shit goes. The second your back is turned the fucking jackals come out.

My sister keeps texting me ancient newspaper clippings of distant ancestors who died of the the Spanish flu. i.e. 'This was your great-uncle Carl'. Thanks?

Another texting buddy warns of a 'spike on day 10' so i guess I've got that to look forward to.

Ordered pizza and watched Major League. Kids and wife all now asleep. The latter will surely wake at some point soon, at which point I am armed with what have become the most precious objects in my household bar none: 2x 500mg paracetemol tablets.

<3

My sister keeps texting me ancient newspaper clippings of distant ancestors who died of the the Spanish flu. i.e. 'This was your great-uncle Carl'. Thanks?

LOL

thank u ulysses

hugs tracer and thx for writing this up :)

thinking of u tracer & the whole hand family
i have avoided reading most firsthand accounts of this scourge aside from this one

Maybe the ringing ears is just coincidental arrival of tinnitus? There's a thread on that. Great choice with Larry Sanders. A show filled mostly with venal characters seems perfect.

I have mild tinnitus which I mostly don't notice unless I think about it, but sometimes when I have a cold it gets a lot worse/harder to ignore, and stays that way for a week or two after all the other symptoms have gone

obv the 'rona is not just a cold, but maybe something similar going on physiologically? not that I know what that is, exactly

thanks for your updates - glad you felt a bit better today and fought for your place on the project! hope you get better soon, and your kid too; it's good that he's mostly not been too bothered by symptoms so I hope it stays that way

this sounds proper shit, tracer. hope you and your family are on the mend soon

thanks for your reports tracer

you're welcome! thank you all for the good wishes. i hope this doesn't feel indulgent. obviously many have it worse than me so far.

It's not indulgent at all. We all really want to read this. Thank you for doing it.

^^ agreed, this is really helpful and (so far) relatively reassuring info.

hoping we hear from stet soon as well.

I take it you're in Australia Tracer Hand, so you wouldn't know CNN's Chris Cuomo. (If you're in, like, Hoboken, New Jersey, just pretend I didn't say that.) Similar to your posts, he's still going on and doing his show every night from his basement. First-hand accounts are enormously helpful to people like me who are living in perpetual fear of this.

tracer is an American who lives in London

according to my xls

The grand ILX tapestry is a mystery to me. I piece it together as best I can.

well my GF just texted that she tested positive.. she was feeling kinda crummy yesterday morning

I stayed over Fri/Sat and we went to a wedding on Saturday... with a reception dinner in a small, poorly ventilated pub (the pelican inn at muir beach)

It is what it is.. I just got a booster about two weeks ago, so I'm not tripping... she just feels guilty for not testing before the wedding (she wasn't feeling any symptoms on Saturday). Fortunately there were not any really old grandparents there, it was mostly younger people

I'm just gonna hang tight and then maybe test in a day or two

I didn't take sic's post this way— I took it as "hey, at-home tests don't always catch Covid, was it a PCR?"

Yes, this is it — even before lack of containment led to rampant mutation, home tests were prone enough to false negatives that secondary testing and 24 & 48-hour follow-ups were advisable. Then US RATs fell behind European in both sensitivity and shifting variants. If the Cow family had advised that eg. they’d done a single test each with free USPS iHealth RATs that were past expiry, I would have tailored advice in response.

are there any free test kits being mailed out anymore?

I think I have one left in the cupboard

(nevermind, there's four tests in the box)

ah man I've been to the Pelican Inn - people always recommended it if I was homesick and wanted a British pub. I had a sore throat yesterday and dug out some tests that were just in date - negative luckily.

I mean I haven't been there in about 15 years so I didn't test due to that post :)

the bartender was telling me all the UK beers they can't get anymore, the distributor doesn't wanna deal with the tariffs

gutted :(

I tested positive this morning. I've had a stuffy nose since Friday, I think, so decided, heck, might as well test, the tests don't stay good forever, and indeed, fwiw the home test best-by date was about two years ago, but it gave me such clear, fast positive results I assume it's accurate. No sneezing, no coughing, no aches, no fever. Just a stuffy nose and a bit of a headache today. Maybe the mild symptoms are because I got my booster just a few weeks back.

ugh good luck, Josh

Oof I’ve had what I think are allergies (minor sore throat, some stuffiness) the last couple days but only have two good tests left. It’s been very dry here in the Mis-Atlantic and that always affects me.

Good luck Josh and family

And yeah, that's the only reason I tested. I don't have allergies, but that's sort of what my mild symptoms felt like, so after a few days of said mild symptoms I figured, well, might as well test. Thanks for the well-wishes, knock wood it doesn't progress any more than this mild stuff.

I just noticed my tests expired in 2024 but based on your results, I imagine they're still good

I don't feel any symptoms at all so I'm just gonna let it ride for now, we'll see if that changes

Some tests had their expiration dates extended, the FDA website would have a list with the new expiration dates

Maybe the mild symptoms are because I got my booster just a few weeks back.

I didn't, but I had it last month and it was very mild. Just a day of fatigue and then a few days of minor cold symptoms.

I don’t know how my wife and I still have not gotten this (****as far as we know!!****) but we are still strategically cautious, depending on the situation.

I caught an asymptomatic case exactly three years ago and dat's dat -- and since 2023 I've been footloose except in high-crowd scenarios.

I had two confirmed cases (i.e. with testing) but also a curious illness in March 2020 that was very likely covid. I was taking CalTrain a lot on the SFBay Peninsula and I think U.S. Patient Zero was in Santa Clara or somewhere like that... the symptoms were the same as the later confirmed cases, with explosive D being the "Hey! I'm here!" calling card

I think now they know that it may have been in the U.S. as early as Dec 2019 but was misdiagnosed as other things

As far as I can tell this is my third confirmed case. I, too, probably had it March 2020 - lost sense of smell for a couple of days, before anyone knew it was a symptom, and later tested positive for antibodies when I donated blood. I had it again maybe some time in 2022 as well. That is, I know I had it, tested positive for it, but can't remember exactly when. I feel like the second time was the only time with a fever (briefly), though still only mild symptoms; I also took a dose of Paxlovid then. This time, I think I started getting stuffy around Friday? The test line was pretty dramatically present this morning, but if I've been sick for 4-5 days I assume it is already waning. Sudafed and Tylenol this AM knocked out any symptoms. If I didn't know I had covid right now I would have no reason to suspect I had covid.

Can't describe it exactly but there's a sharp nasal feeling I associate with having COVID (never lost my sense of smell thankfully...3x for me too, all pretty mild).

I did have the 'flavor dysphoria' thing in one of my cases... things tasting weird & gross, like garbage

I managed to pass through the peak of COVID without ever catching it, or indeed any other flu or cold-like illnesses at all, despite having to submit periodic swabs as part of my job which would presumably have picked up an asymptomatic infection. As far as I can tell I still haven't caught it, or if I did catch it the symptoms were undetectable.

As mentioned passim I visited Hong Kong and Shenzhen in October 2019. I sailed off to a couple of islands, did a bit of hiking, browsed the huge multi-story shop just across the Hong Kong / Shenzhen border, visited a theme park in Shenzhen, even a wet market. But so did lots of other people, and Shenzhen is five hundred miles away from Wuhan. I remember feeling strangely woozy after coming back, but that was probably just jet lag.

Perhaps I picked up something vaguely related to COVID that helped. But if that was the case Hong Kong would have sailed through the COVID pandemic unscathed. And yet it did do exceptionally well with the first wave - by the end of April 2020 Hong Kong had had just over 1,000 cases vs 171,253 in the UK, although obviously they're very different sizes (it would be more relevant to compare Hong Kong with London, but I can't find separate data for London). And yet that was because Hong Kong was managed more firmly than the UK, so who knows.

I'm reminded that Boris Johnson was in intensive care after catching COVID during the early phase. For a brief moment it was possible to imagine that he might have learned something from it and become more humble. It was as if God gave him a learning experience, and he totally ignored it.

Same with Trump! I remember it was announced that he had it and I was going on a three day camping trip in a remote part of the Catskills— it was a sweet few days off grid, imagining Trump dead

took a test: negative... a friend offered me a ticket to see Múm tomorrow night so I figured I better confirm I'm okay

But the line was very faint and the liquid was more like a foam, it was hard to drop into the test strip.. but I don't have any real symptoms, I feel as crap as normal.. GF took some paxlovid which she said kinda kicked her ass, almost more than the covid

its crazy that any cold or allergies appear and my first thought is, fuck is this Covid again? At one point I think I had done like 8 negative tests in a 2 year period. But for me, there's a fatigue level and an odd food-tastes-like-nothing feeling that are the tells. A little embarrassing but I have to admit I never got shots beyond the first three, and part of that is the guarantee I'd be sicker the next day than most of the days I actually had Covid....

I get a free flu jab though my job (UK). went to the pharmacy to get it and saw a sign saying private covid jabs are available for £85! I've long thought private covid jabs should be available but did not expect them to be that much.

I think older and more (even mildly) vulnerable people still get them free which is probably worthwhile.

that's 15 less than a friend paid.

i got my traditional birthday flu jab recently and it was £25, up 5 quid from last year. (the two years before that were free)

and yes my parents, uncles are forever at the doctor's this time of year for free jabs, flu, COVID, shingles or that other generic sounding respiratory disease (respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)).

I tested negative yesterday morning, Friday. Never had any symptoms really worse than a stuffy nose. Maybe that's because I am up to date with my vaccines.