I can't edit my above post but I would like to say that I have a suspicion Vitamin D...particularly D3 in "decent" dosage has a part to play in my recovery.
I had been taking a VIT.D3 supplement through winter but at 400iu daily. (Thus not terribly high)
But in March I ran out of it and didn't bother to re-order. Silly me.
Recently, I have been deliberately sunning myself for 30 minutes WITHOUT sunscreen. I have been doing that as a medicine, no other reason.
I am fair-skinned and live in a northern latitude, so we don't get really fierce heat here.
(This would have to be sensibly done for people who live in hotter countries or states. And black or dark skinned people may need 30 minutes or a little more to get the vitamin D that way.)
The skin makes high doses of vitamin D3 with that sun exposure. I think it has helped me.
I had the virus . It started in March with gut issues, but I didn't know it was Covid, until the "classic" symptoms came on April 2nd.
Chills with very low temperature, followed by high fever, very tight painful-to breathe chest, difficulty breathing, coughing, out of breath, loss of appetite, and weakness.
But I never lost my sense of smell or taste.
Those dramatic symptoms didn't last too long -about a week. I began to feel better quite quickly.
Fortunately my cough was slightly productive, so I could get some relief from the tightness by coughing stuff out.
What I coughed up was white, didn't look "infected" at all!
So I felt so much better for a good three weeks, and slowly recouperating and getting a lot of strength back.
But after that, the gut issues returned. Not too serious, just uncomfortable. My usual high-fiber healthy diet didn't suit me any more so I had to eat differently.
That was more of a nuisance than anything. But it was not easy, as a strange anxiety also came with the gut problems. I don't normally get anxiety issues.
So I'd had that since about May, and had learned to live with it. I was sure it was Covid, which hadn't gone away and I had the "long tail" version.
But lately, I am beginning to feel a lot better gradually. Much stronger. The exhaustion has gone. I used to feel exhausted particularly in late mornings.
I am now able to do more athletic things, and deal with heavy garden work like coppicing trees. I actually feel good while doing it! And okay after.
I sleep well again now.
I had some tests for the gut issues, and all the tests are negative. So that shows there is no inflammation or nfection there of any kind.
My gut is much better. I can't tolerate as much fiber as before, but can eat healthy foods now. I just have to eat sensibly but feel as if things are almost completely back to my healthy self again.
I honestly do feel I have recovered from Covid-19.
I think it takes quite some time for the body to re-balance itself after this virus, and there is damagae done, which takes time to heal.
I'm pretty sure that I had it in mid-March. My partner in NYC came to visit me in DC on a bus, which is a pretty small poorly-ventilated space to share with plenty of people coming from a city in the grip of a terrible outbreak at the time. 5.5 days later, I completely lost my sense of smell. At the time, I had no idea that was a symptom of covid-19, since it was only days later that it hit the news that loss of sense of smell or taste could be a better predictor of infection than fever. About a week later, I had a day of fever and headache, but that passed. My partner had only mild fatigue and some muscle soreness. His other girlfriend in NYC though had it extremely badly. She wound up with double pneumonia due to covid-19 and was coughing up blood. She did recover completely though. Other people I know in NYC have had lasting health effects. The office manager in my office in Maryland is still out with lingering effects since falling ill in March (I just donated a week of leave to her), and her fiancé died due to covid-19. So, in my experience and social circles, the effects have ranged from mild to death, which seems in line with everything in the news.
i am 37 years old, so don't come for me when i tell you this, but tiktok has actually been a wealth of information for me when it comes to what people have gone through or do go through during their covid-19 experience. there are a ton of users on there that do a daily (sometimes hourly) update on how they are feeling, doing, what their symptoms are, etc.
admittedly, there are people (mostly teenagers) who post videos about it for the reactions, etc. -- but they're easily avoidable if you follow the right people.
like so many have said here, everyone is different. i, for one, enjoy reading about the experiences because it baffles me that so many people have so many effects from it. for example? jimmie johnson, a nascar driver, just tested positive for it the other day and has had zero symptoms. his wife also has it, and she has what she calls "allergy symptoms" but has no fever, fatigue, migraine, etc.
super fascinating stuff.
Yet another recent article on long-term effects - "There is growing evidence that the virus causes a far greater array of symptoms than was previously understood. And that its effects can be agonisingly prolonged: in Garner’s case for more than seven weeks."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/weird-hell-professor-advent-calendar-covid-19-symptoms-paul-garner
I actually found some details from people who recovered, stories are not pretty:
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/coronavirus/exhaustion-uncertainty-mark-coronavirus-survivors-journeys/2232713/
There is a lot of variability as far as severity goes, but if you're out of luck, you will have long-term problems, lasting months or longer - not pretty.
Just to add to the mix, the first case known to have happened through community spread in Oregon was diagnosed February 28. The patient was in the paper today, May 6, because he was leaving the hospital at last. He was shifting to a nursing/ rehab care place. The paper says he can walk a short distance but then has to have oxygen, and that he has other challenges. So a case with a good outcome (he didn't die) is two months and a week in the hospital, followed by further rehab care. Remind me not to leave my house for, say, the next two years.
I've only read reports from those who recovered. No first hand accounts. It really seems to be a wide range of experiences that people have. Seems like lots lose weight (not such a bad thing) and have zero appetite, feel extreme fatigue and lethargy, and fevers that build into the night and are very uncomfortable with chills and shaking. Coughing is a hallmark sign but people don't talk about that like they do the other things.
Nobody has posted on here yet who has knowingly had it. Not many people actively post on this website, though I have no idea how many read the comments, but again, so far and so good none of us has reported getting it. We could of course all have it and not know it. I've had symptoms of it and thought of getting tested a couple of weeks ago, but tests in the US have largely been unavailable unless you meet stringent criteria or unless you're a medical worker. I went on the CDC website and it led me through a series of questions about what I was experiencing and ended by telling me they were sorry I wasn't feeling my best and hoped I felt better soon -- in short, I didn't have it and didn't need to get tested and with the still extreme shortage of tests even after all this time where most of us live we're nowhere close to what has been suggested by the experts, that to open our economy we all need to get tested repeatedly because the tests around today are quite inaccurate with a high degree of false negatives and due to the FDA allowing everyone and their cousin to sell antibody tests without FDA approval that they work those tests are even worse with a whole lot of false positives. Maybe before we're all dead we'll all be able to go and just request repeated testing if we want so we'll know just how many of us have it, have had it, and to make sure we don't get it an hour after we got our negative results, but it will be very expensive and time consuming to do that and we have a lot of people in the US so who knows. However, I've said this before, at a time like this folks used to tune in to their trusted TV and radio news programs and read the daily newspaper and all those sources are full of interviews with people who have had it and recovered from it. In real time, Chris Cuomo, an anchor on CNN, has been documenting his illness and slow recovery from covid. If you look, you actually can't avoid seeing this information, but I realize we live in a world today where most people don't read the best newspapers and don't watch or listen to the best news programs and so we're balkanized in what we see. The fact is, almost everyone who has gotten covid has recovered from it, but what recovery means is different for different people and is still unknown if some organs sustain long-term damage from it or heal. It's a new virus and it will take time to learn about it. But we will. Those who have died are high in absolute numbers but tiny in the percentage of people alive in the world. What we're all trying to do is make it stay that way until we have better tools to fight back. Peace, all.
I agree, there are a lot of different ways to get sick from Covid-19, and it can attack different parts of the body. It would be hard to generalize from anyone's stories (or all of them) what Covid-19 might do to someone who gets it.
My cousin has Covid-19 right now, she's in her 20s. She doesn't know where she got it. A few days into the illness, she was too weak to get out of bed. Her headaches hurt so much that she couldn't sleep all night. She's less weak by now, but it is taking a long time to get better. That's how it hit her. But it might hit the next person a different way.
You can google to find thousands of stories of people all over the world who have recovered. There are lots of different effects of Covid infection- some people get specific problems that are not experienced by others, so there is no set pattern of recovery. Some get it with no symptoms which still involves a recovery and some are in hospital for a month before they recover.