[jrumbut]

I think part of it a cultural idea, perhaps driven by our employment system and antibiotics, that it takes about 1-5 days to get over a most illnesses.

If you read older literature, you see people taking months to get over things like the flu, a whole process of recuperation completely unheard of even among those who may have the affluence today to do it.

There are the outliers who may never recover from COVID, people who assign their general discontentments to it, but I suspect there is another group that maybe just needed more than a week or two to recover and are suffering the consequences of not taking it or not being allowed to take it.

[switch007]

I’ve had flu about 6 times in my life (I mean real flu, not sniffles/cold) and even when I was younger, a 5-day recovery would have been a miracle. For me it’s 2 weeks to feel normal, at a minimum!

[jlokier]

I've had flu, or something with symptoms like it, twice as an adult, and both times it took a whole month to get through the "really feeling awful and stuck in bed" stage.

Recovery was quick afterwards. But just being ill was much more than a 1-5 day event.