Just seen this from my brother, posted to Facebook.
It sounds like he has had a mild bout, and his 2nd daughter an even milder bout. Alternatively he picked it up in hospital the previous week and his 2nd and 3rd daughters are still to have it.
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I am writing this at 3:30am on Monday morning (I can’t sleep), the fifth day of our family’s self-isolation. I am recovering from what I think was Covid-19 but I can’t be sure and probably never will be.
This is a long post but I hope you find it informative and maybe helpful in this time of uncertainty. It is all my own work – nothing copied or pasted here, although I have referred to a couple of external sources for background information.
On Wednesday afternoon my wife collected our elder daughter from her student house in Exeter. She had been suffering from mild flu-like symptoms and the rest of her housemates (a couple of whom had had similar symptoms) had already left. At the time, there were only a tiny number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the whole of Devon and it seemed vastly more likely that she had picked up a seasonal flu bug. There was no food or medication in the house and no one for her to ask for help. We knew that, ideally, she should self-isolate in Exeter but, in the circumstances, we felt we had no choice but to collect her. Fortunately, because we knew we were about to self-isolate for 14 days, we were able to stock up on essentials first. I was at home anyway, recovering from minor surgery under GA so all we had to do was tell school that my wife (a teacher) and younger daughter would not be in again before the end of term (which became academic when the government announced that schools were closing the following day).
I started feeling unwell overnight Friday/Saturday. I had to get up to go to the loo far more often than usual, but was only able to pass small amounts of urine each time. A little bit of medical knowledge being a dangerous thing, I assumed I had contracted a UTI while in hospital but. After a lengthy discussion with staff at the treatment centre in Shepton Mallet that seemed rather less likely but could only be ruled out by a urine test. I decided not to burden the NHS with that over a weekend when they are already struggling and wait to see how I felt on Monday. Meanwhile I increased the amount of water I was drinking.
On Saturday I was lethargic, which I put down to my disturbed night and post-op recovery. By early evening I was beginning to suffer from alternating shivers and sweats and had no appetite (extremely unusual for me!) and I had a very slight temperature. I went to bed early but woke up at about 2am with uncontrollable shivering which lasted for what seemed like ages, but was probably only about 45 minutes. I knew I wasn’t cold but could not stop myself from shivering. After about an hour, the shivers were replaced by hot sweats, which lasted until morning. I spent most of Sunday in bed. By the evening I was feeling much better and had some appetite. I didn’t get any more shivers but I have had several more bouts of sweats, the latest of which has resulted in me getting out of bed to write this. I have had no cough whatsoever, although I have had a very slight sore throat (mostly a dry sensation).
Neither my wife nor younger daughter have shown any symptoms yet. We should know in the next day or two whether they are going to. Our elder daughter recovered within a day of getting home. Yesterday, however, she lost her sense of smell. It seems that anosmia (I looked it up) may be an emerging symptom of Covid-19 and, more than anything else, is making us think that she had more than just seasonal flu.
The absence of testing of the general population for coronavirus makes it extremely difficult to understand what is happening outside hospitals. I have heard estimates that up to 20 times as many people could have been infected as there are confirmed cases but, in the absence of data, that could be no more than a guess. It would be really useful if the government, instead of releasing the daily number of confirmed cases, gave us their estimate of the proportion of the population that have been infected. Knowing that, for example, 1 in 5 of the population is infected but symptomless would bring it home to people how important social distancing really is. But they can’t because they don’t have the data because they’ve decided only to test people who are admitted to hospital. Inevitably, the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions are more frequent visitors to hospitals. It therefore follows that those people are far more likely to be tested for coronavirus resulting in the testing suggesting that they are far more susceptible to the virus. That is likely to be a false assumption There are almost certainly thousands of families going through a similar experience to our own, completely off the NHS’s radar. Almost all of them will be doing the responsible thing but there will be some who feel unable to or do not believe they have Covid-19 so do not need to self-isolate.
On the positive side, and assuming catching Covid-19 does lead to a degree of immunity, our herd immunity is possibly developing faster than anticipated
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