Ask HN: How did you catch Covid-19?

[blackpanda]

Anyone here caught COVID-19 while taking all advised precautions?

Just trying to measure how precautious we have to be exactly? Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?

[darrelld]

Two people in my office were out sick. One came to sit at my desk to help me out with a DB query after she was done with sick leave.

I got sick a few days later.

Went to the doctor who said they couldn't give COVID-19 tests since they didn't have it, but she gave me a regular flu test.

Results came back and I was flagged as positive for Coronavirus, but it came with a note from my doctor saying there was no way to confirm that it was COVID-19. I assume it was given symptoms and timing.

[Foober223]

I don't think any official statistics exist. And any stats could even be misleading. People who take precautions very seriously (ie nurses) may actually have higher rates of infection. The average Joe Blow who never wears a mask or washes hands may end up with a lower % chance of infection. Because those nurses are working in hospitals, surrounded by super spreaders shedding virus all day long.

Covid-19 has proven similar to the common cold in transmission. The common cold is itself a corona virus so it makes sense.

Basically you are going to be exposed to Covid-19 at some point in your life. It's guaranteed. It's here to stay with the human race, just like the common cold corona's.

But there is value in delaying your exposure, even if you have little personal risk. Delaying your own infection also delays the infection of others (more vulnerable than you). They may be holding out for a vaccine. It avoids overloading a hospital. It gives the medical community more time to develop best practices and apply them to more people. If everyone gets covid-19 on day 1 then no one gets to benefit from the hard won knowledge paid for in death and damaged lung tissue.

Viruses tend to become less deadly as they mutate. Delaying your infection has value, even if it's inevitable.

[Foober223]

To the question in the title. I don't know how I caught it. Before the lock down I was touching doors used by thousands of people daily. Touching gas pumps, etc. I have a habit of touching my face.

Luckily I had a mild reaction, but I still feel a slight tickle/burning in the lungs 2 months into it.

[dmurthy]

What were your symptoms like? I’ve read only that mild is not exactly mild by flu standards yet I know another friend who had it but was having a bad throat ache for 3 days and fever. Took her 10 days to recover.

[Foober223]

Have/had a mild Bronchitis-like feeling in my lungs. But have/had no difficulty breathing despite that. No shortness of breath. The feeling sometimes goes away, but them later resurfaces.

To the best of my knowledge I have not lost lung capacity. I can mow the lawn (.3 acre) with a push mower in 1 go without stopping in hot weather.

Had a mild headache and mild sore throat at the height of it. Body was mildly achy in the evening near/at bed time. Occasional cough near the tail end of the recovery. For me this was not a cough heavy sickness.

No medication used. Lifted weights throughout the entire process. Symptoms were very mild but lasted forever.

Overall my personal symptoms were mild enough that I was not suffering. This is not to downplay. Other people have strange effects, such as "covid toes" where the flesh in their toes die. Or their immune system reacts causing inflammation in the lungs with serious damage to tissue. One bad thing about new viruses is a strong immune system can sometimes bite you. It was a big issue in the 1918 flu that was most deadly to people in their 20's. Elderly were relatively untouched by the 1918. Luckily Covid-19 has not proven to be particularly dangerous to young people so far. But it is causing bad immune responses in some young people, even if not at a large scale like the 1918 virus.

[sunstone]

Not all "common colds" are covid. I recall 30%-40% of common colds are one of a few types of covid. Clearly covid-19 is no kind of common cold at all.

[Foober223]

Yes, that's true, but corona's are considered to be colds regardless. Covid-19 will certainly become "common" once most of the world has been exposed.

Just FYI, "common cold" is not meant to downplay the deadly effects, especially if you know the history of the cold. The mention of cold was to draw similarities in how it is transmitted (what the OP's question was about).

[tmaly]

I am not sure if I had it, but I had a back sickness back in December. My son caught something that they said tested positive for RSV. I caught something but got over it.

One of the guys on my team got Covid. The girl sitting in next cube also got it. He said it was like a pretty bad flu, but they both recovered.

My neighbor had it, but he was in Westchester county NY running his cleaning business. He thought it was just stress from all the work. He went to a local urgent care down the road and that is how he found out he has the anti-bodies.

My other neighbor's grandmother had it, she was 85. They gave her the experimental plasma as she did not look like she was going to make it. She recovered thankfully.

So far I only know of one person that passed away from it. A good friend had a mentor who was 63. He was over in London and was forced into a NHS hospital. He passed away from the Covid.

On the note of being cautious, I still would like a formal study done on surface transmission. There has been some much misinformation on this. There was a study cycling on the news months back. CDC did an update to their site recently and all the news sites reported the study was flawed. On May 22, CDC updated website to provide clarification which essentially said they don't know about surface transmission risks.

[alexyz12]

I am shocked that I don't know anyone who has it. I am fascinated by this question though. I would have figured 4 months ago that everyone I know would have gotten it by now.

[Darmody]

I think we all got it at home. We didn't knew it was COVID so we probably spread it around. This happened in late February when no measures were taken yet.

Several weeks later we were told that person A who went to Milan was in the hospital in a very delicate condition. I want to point out that he is overweight. That person passed the virus to Person B who passed it to Person C who lives with me.

We all got sick. From almost no symptoms to mild symptoms.

I personally felt like crap for two or three days. I felt tired, I had my eyes burning like if I had a fever (I don't know if I had fever or not, I don't usually check unless I'm really hot) and I also had a cough for a few days.

We're curious to see if we have antibodies which would be pretty nice.

[beckler]

Pretty sure we caught it at the end of February just before things starting getting serious in the US. We had gone to an indoor water park for the weekend, and roughly two weeks later we were all sick with flu-like symptoms, but we all took a flu test and they all came back negative.

[therockspush]

Guessing most people on here talking about maybe getting it in February are from the Bay Area.

February was the last time I got sick, covid-like symptoms, and going back through my slack out-of-office channel a lot of people at my office did too.

[countername]

I didn't catch covid-19, or maybe I had it at February when I got a little bit sick. Who knows. In my family or social field nobody got it too, or just didn't know it.

[kleer001]

> how precautious we have to be exactly?

Nobody knows precisely. It's a brand new pathogen. Research is still being done.

> Is taking all good measures reduces the chances to 1% or 0.01%?

What's your comfortable level of risk? How wide is your sense of self? Does it include your neighbors? passers by? their neighbors and their grandparents?

[whb07]

Sub 40 yo are at higher risk of death from other things even if you catch this virus. Eat right and exercise seems to be the best defense even if you acquire it as the largest risk factor besides being old is obesity.

[DanBC]

> the largest risk factor besides being old is obesity.

Obesity increases risk of covid-19 (and many other diseases). It's not the largest (other than age) risk factor.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v...

> In summary after full adjustment, death from COVID-19 was strongly associated with: being male (hazard ratio 1.99, 95%CI 1.88-2.10); older age and deprivation (both with a strong gradient); uncontrolled diabetes (HR 2.36 95% CI 2.18-2.56); severe asthma (HR 1.25 CI 1.08-1.44); and various other prior medical conditions. Compared to people with ethnicity recorded as white, black people were at higher risk of death, with only partial attenuation in hazard ratios from the fully adjusted model (age-sex adjusted HR 2.17 95% CI 1.84-2.57; fully adjusted HR 1.71 95% CI 1.44-2.02); with similar findings for Asian people (age-sex adjusted HR 1.95 95% CI 1.73-2.18; fully adjusted HR 1.62 95% CI 1.43-1.82).

> Conclusions

> We have quantified a range of clinical risk factors for death from COVID-19, some of which were not previously well characterised, in the largest cohort study conducted by any country to date. People from Asian and black groups are at markedly increased risk of in-hospital death from COVID-19, and contrary to some prior speculation this is only partially attributable to pre-existing clinical risk factors or deprivation; further research into the drivers of this association is therefore urgently required. Deprivation is also a major risk factor with, again, little of the excess risk explained by co-morbidity or other risk factors. The findings for clinical risk factors are concordant with policies in the UK for protecting those at highest risk. Our OpenSAFELY platform is rapidly adding further NHS patients' records; we will update and extend these results regularly. Keywords COVID-19, risk factors, ethnicity, deprivation, death, informatics.