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

'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.

Trayce is in Australia.

my wife’s had an elevated temp since Friday and generally been feeling duff - felt a little worse today, called 111 and the doc said ‘yeah, probably a touch of the ‘rona, what are you gonna do 🤷‍♂️, call back if your symptoms get more severe’

if only there was some type of, like, test or something that could tell you if you had it

fingers x-ed for the best bg :(

oh shit, good luck to you both

Good luck Mr and Mrs Gazzara.

best to you BG.

Has Tracer posted anywhere recently?

good luck to your wife and of course yourself and the whole family! not fun to have when you have a young'un to attend to :(

(er, unless my .xlsx is faulty)

tracer posted here earlier today (phones and kids) and on one of my whatsapps

Good luck bg

yeah, we’ve got a 21-month-old - challenging enough keeping her entertained without the possibility of a visit from the ‘rona

my eyes have been super-itchy today and i’m knackered but that could just as easily be the start of hay fever season and being run down from being cooped up for three weeks

time will tell i guess - if my wife has been ill with it since the end of last week it’s been pretty mild so far, thankfully

it helps that i have no friends and never go anywhere. i always knew there would be an upside to that someday. during peak pandemic people always masked when they came in the store and i never got sick.

maria probably got it from her step-mother who never met a mask she would wear or a new age dance party that she wouldn't go to. just this past week maria was supposed to go to dinner with her at the very place she thinks she got it all those years ago and her step-mother called to cancel because of covid!! it would have been the double step-mom whammy!!

she's very nice - and a nurse! - but that contact improv crowd is not to be trusted.

Nurses are the most feral COVID deniers imo.

My mom got it for the first time, tested positive this morning. She has hypertension so I'm a bit worried, going to tell her to take it very easy. My aunt also got it possibly for the first time (they didn't get it from each other.) I was at my mom's house two days ago, and flew back on yet another plane full of coughers. And O'Hare sounded like a collective sickbed. Wish me luck, I'd prefer to never get this.

Though I suppose I could have had it asymptomatically and never knew...what a bullshit virus.

We think my wife had it about a month ago — very mild case if so, but flu-like symptoms and major fatigue lingered for three or four weeks.

Based upon all available evidence, my mom appears to have picked it up dining outside at a restaurant, on a breezy day. The server was semi close to her. It's really everywhere right now. Sending the kid back to school wearing a mask, he's been masking since he went back to school in person in fall of 2021 so that's not a change. I'm just glad several of this close friends continue to follow the same masking philosophy so he doesn't feel weird.

I've never heard of an outdoor case! At least around me.

tested positive today, I did not suspect covid and was blindsided. symptoms are mild except the bleary lightheaded feeling is unbearable and I don't have the mental acuity to make a cup of tea. It took a lot of effort to write this actually.

David @ the Dentist "is this forever??" where I'm @ rn

oh well, it was a good run

Feel better Deflatormouse. This was your first bout? Yeah, good run.

Feel better!

Just curious, what prompted you to test, especially if the symptoms were mild? I've had to set a relatively measurable bar for myself to justify a test, like two or more conspicuous unshakable symptoms, fever plus something else. Otherwise I'd be testing all the time something felt off, because welcome to middle age, lol. Am I achy because I am sick, or because I slept funny, or exercised too much, or spent the previous day moving heavy boxes around?

I just saw a Facebook friend declare “I am never taking a COVID test again!” which is such a weird position to take. When I’m sick I LIKE knowing what I’m sick with, if possible, for lots of reasons.

All the best DM.

if i’m sick and am potentially hanging out with people in the near future, i take a covid test

lot of my friends are immunocompromised tho

I mostly self-isolate when I'm sick regardless of what I'm sick with, but I still think it's valuable to know what you have. If there was one wide-spectrum test that could tell if you have COVID, flu, a cold, strep, RSV or whatever, I'd take it any time I felt crappy.

getting there https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/well/covid-flu-combination-tests.html

xps thanks! I called my ent for an appointment, said I had a chest cold that might have caused an adenoid infection (I get em constantly) and would she take a look to see if I need antibiotics. she told me to go to urgent care first.

really lucky because tho I'm generally reclusive, this tends to be my busiest week of the year socially (@ivy - good idea).

I stopped masking on the subway... less than 6 months ago? too complacent

i tested neg recently, and decided to compete in a climbing competition i had signed up for— of course, my performance was off, but i honestly did pretty well for someone who had just had covid.

I've seen those combination flu/COVID tests in CVS.