As my experience with COVID-19 switches from a very personal fight to an occupational one, my heart goes out to all those who have lost loved ones to the virus, whose own personal battles did not conclude as positively as mine.
What have I learned from this?
Well, coronavirus can present extremely differently. I had complete anosmia and aguesia before developing mild fevers. By day three I had started to improve clinically and my taste began to return on day eight. The aguesia thus appears largely reversible. The anosmia – that reversibility remains pending. What was clear, however, was that I had no respiratory symptoms.
Fi, on the other hand, had back pain followed by very high fevers and forty-eight hours of significant nausea and profuse vomiting. She too had no respiratory symptoms and also improved on day three.
The only unifying symptoms were the presence of a fever and restless legs, which I cannot find reported anywhere.
It is highly likely that the coronavirus has mutated countless times over already – each strain a different dialect but interpreted by the immune system in a universal way to hopefully offer protection from future re-infection.
Given intra-household social distancing was perhaps not optimal, I conclude that the incubation period i.e. the time between infection and symptoms, was three to five days, which matches a lot of the reports, depending on whether the back pain was truly a symptom of COVID, for Fi.
Lastly, the test perhaps needs work and has a significant false negative rate, a phenomenon that can lead to much stigma and stress in itself.
People say that with age comes experience. I would add that with experience comes empathy. Having lived without the sense of taste and whilst continuing to live without the sense of smell, I can truly understand how difficult and bizarre it is.
My parents are from Hong Kong and I was born in Greenwich so phenotypically, I appear Chinese. Being Chinese and in the UK during these telling times is something I’ve grown more conscious of, for obvious reasons.
When the news broke about a new coronavirus erupting through Wuhan, I remember seeing video clips posted online of wet markets. One of dead bats being butchered and ending up in a soup bowl particularly haunted my mind. I felt utterly embarrassed for the lack of hygiene, especially for someone who grew up behind the counter of a Chinese takeaway. I felt ashamed and angry at the simply implausible need to eat bats and pangolins and whatnot. There is enough good meat in the world not to have to eat endangered animals, or ones known to carry diseases such as a rabies.
Quite early on in the pandemic, I began reading conspiracy theories about coronavirus. If the Chinese did create COVID in a lab and unleash it across the world, then I’d best wear a t-shirt broadcasting that I’m Made in the UK.
This diary ends here and I hope you have enjoyed it. I also thank you if you have read it and followed my progress, as knowing I had readers out there gave me the strength to write and share my experience as well as recover.
It has been a strange year, and we’re not even half way through. Who could have guessed that 2020 would be the year the Olympics never happened? There has been a lot of bad news in the last four months so may mine and Fi’s full recovery be some good news for a change. The strangest thing of all, is that having witnessed how severe the organic destruction of COVID can be, mine was ultimately, just a simple viral illness…
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Every few days... 