We spent last Friday and Saturday with my wife’s extended family. It was for a funeral and family gathering. Several people who attended had previously had COVID and several we know of probably didn’t get so shots.
It was probably the first event we have attended like that in years. When my wife’s father died we only had 6 people there.
We have our fingers crossed hoping everyone comes out of that gathering okay.
For those of you who tested positive with a rapid antigen test, did the positive line show up on the test right away? I think i remember reading that you should wait 15 minutes but you’d think that if the liquid makes it to the top of the test and doesn’t cause a line to show where the positive result is then it wouldn’t magically show up 10 minutes later. I’ve always been confused by that.
The positive line shows up as the antigen in the saliva are stained. The stain will only become visible quickly if there are a ton of antigen in your sample for the test to bind to and color.
If you have, say, 1/1000th as much of the protein antigen in your sample, or you only partially applied reagent or something else went wrong, it’ll take minutes before enough is bound that enough staining is generated to be visually identifiable.
Disclaimer: I have seen a barely visible line but it wasn’t confirmed with a PCR, just treated as a positive.
My son’s positive showed up within seconds
So, exactly one year after my first Covid infection, got it again, likely from the coughing unmasked #$%@ behind me on my most recent plane flight. I moved seats, but apparently not before she spread it to me because she couldn’t be bothered to pull a mask out of a drawer before a 4.5-hour flight.
This time symptoms were a very runny nose and sneezing. The 2022 version of Covid I had came on completely differently — no congestion at all, just achiness, coughing, and feeling very run down. I didn’t take a test right away because I was convinced it was a cold, but went ahead and picked one up just to be safe since I’m around family members and it went positive almost immediately.
I don’t feel as run down as last year’s variety, but the congestion is a bitch as I use a CPAP and I’m now at my limit of using Afrin.
Also, Paxlovid makes everything taste like metal. Even my saliva.
Still worthwhile getting the paxlovid, good job there.
If you haven’t heard this already, hard candies like Jolly Ranchers can help with the Paxlovid metallo-taste.
Feel better!
I wouldn’t describe paxlovid mouth as metal. Someone said it was burnt grapefruit, and I totally agree with that.
I bought tic tacs and that helped a lot.
Our luck in dodging/vaccinating against COVID ran out a couple of weeks ago. My wife is part of a large & active online charity group, and at the end of July they held their first annual get-together since 2019. So despite her immune-suppressed condition, she really wanted to go see her friends in-person again. I totally understand & thought it was a good idea, it would be like if Qt3 had an annual get-together, I’d want to be there.
Unfortunately, while they had enough attendance to rent out an entire lodge in northern Colorado, turned out they shared the eating facilities with a couple of summer camps, totaling about 350 slobbery, nose-wiping kids. Now throw in their own large group of people flying in from all over the country, traveling through crowded airports and in aluminum death tubes, and the odds of someone getting & spreading COVID get kind of high.
Sure enough, within a couple of days of returning home, various members of her group started to report they had COVID. My wife tested positive on August 3. She had a vaccination booster about a month before, but she is on at least one drug that is contraindicated for Paxlovid, and two that are not completely contraindicated but should be avoided if possible (it’s not possible for her to skip those two, she’d be even worse off), so no Paxlovid for her. Her doctors figured out a plan that included more frequent infusions of Hizentra (they said it has COVID antibodies in it, that was news to me) and a couple infusions of IVIG.
She had a couple days of mild to strong flu-like symptoms (and her other meds contraindicate all NSAIDs, so she had to just tough that out, ugh), lost her sense of smell completely for about a week (it is partially back), but now her symptoms are down to stuffy sinuses, runny nose, and some coughing. Despite the treatment plan, she tested positive again today, making it 12 days in a row. Given all of her immune issues, nobody is sure if she’s infectious still or not. It seems like her immune-suppressed body is having a very difficult time clearing the virus.
So far, nobody else in the house has tested positive. We’re all isolating ourselves as much as possible, wearing masks around her, and when we had a new HVAC system installed last September, we included one of those ultraviolet microbe death chambers in the intake, and nearly doubled the usual length. No idea if that does anything to the COVID coronavirus, it was mostly to kill any airborne microbes or viruses we could due to her suppressed immune system. But, it may be helping keep the rest of us from being infected, or kill other opportunistic microbes & viruses, so the staggering electric bill we have coming from running the A/C 24/7 is a small price to pay if it stops even one infection.
No Molnupiravir, no Remdesivir? Those would have been potential fallbacks when Paxlovid isn’t an option.
Not as good, harder to administer, but at least some proven efficacy.
She said they didn’t mention anything but Paxlovid. Since she’s such a house of cards of meds & conditions, I think they’re trying to move very carefully. Since her symptoms are not severe & her breathing and pulse ox have stayed normal, I think they are hoping her body will clear the virus given time & trying to avoid adding any other drugs to the pile. They took her off all of her immune suppressants about 10 days now, but she tested positive again today - 15 days in a row.
She feels bad that we’re all trapped at home because she’s still positive. I told her that I’m fine being trapped at home, this is no different than the last few years, and her having this mild but persistent case sure is better than her being hospitalized with severe symptoms! We’ve lived through the pandemic in a constant, mild state of denial and dread because we expected her to have a severe (if not fatal) case of COVID if she contracted the virus. Hooray for science!
It did make for a 30th anniversary that was nowhere near our original plans. We ended up have a bottle of actual Champagne delivered, and toasted each other from across the kitchen. A uniquely memorable celebration, actually!
Side note. I did learn that UV-C is hell on any coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 included. The membrane of a virus is basically transparent to UV-C, so UV-C’s high energy quickly destroys or damages a virus’ DNA beyond replication. The makers of home and institutional UV sterilization units claim third-party lab & university testing found 99.99% of viruses are killed with just one second of exposure to a high-intensity UV-C bulb, and two or three seconds of exposure is essentially eradication. Assuming that is all true, our in-duct UV-C unit is probably doing a lot to keep anyone else in the house from being infected.
I’m glad your wife’s case is turning out to be relatively mild.
We lived in fear for my dad, who has pretty severe myasthenia gravis (MG), an autoimmune condition that has him on immuno suppressants. He managed to make it to March of this year before he finally caught covid. We’re still not quite sure how, since he didn’t socialized except for outside, and was fully vaccinated and boosted; the most likely culprit is at his doctor’s office, even though he was N95 masked.
While he tested positive and felt pretty crappy, he did pull through, and (some four months later) he’s feeling better than ever. Some of that is that his level of fear has gone down, some of it is that he’s actually taking more risks now – doing things like playing tennis, etc. – which have helped his physical health even if they are potentially risky. Anecdotally, anyway, it seems that covid is pretty mild in a lot of cases even for the immuno suppressed when they’re boosted and vaccinated.
I hope your wife’s case ends up being like my Dad’s, in that she recovers fully and doesn’t suffer any longer term consequences.
She finally tested negative today! The CDC says one negative test is enough, LA County Health Department still says two negatives 48 hours apart to say you’re clear, but since LACHD went overboard on a lot of stuff, we’ll take the one negative & she will continue masking up (she’s been wearing a mask in public since about 2016, so that’s nothing new). The last couple days it has been taking longer to show positive, and the line has been getting fainter, so we figure she’s good to go.
We’re very grateful to the researchers behind the vaccine (I have a late uncle who was a virology researcher at the NIH for 40 years, so we always try to remember them as well), the creators of the vaccine, her medical team, and the very patient nurses she’s lucky to have.
MG is one of the various auto-immune disorders she has. She had a robotic thymectomy several years ago, 2018 IIRC. They brought in a specialist surgeon from another hospital to do the surgery, and it is such a rare procedure that every surgical resident in the area, even from other hospitals, was trying to get permission to scrub in & observe. I said we should have sold tickets and that would have paid for it. That seems to have really slowed the disease down, maybe even reversed it a little because she has a much easier time swallowing than she did, and her bouts of double-vision are greatly reduced, but she still has unpredictable moments where she’ll suddenly drop something because the nerves in her hand decide they don’t want to talk to her hand muscles for a few seconds.
It appears that COVID is in our house for the third time. The first two times, my wife got it, and the rest of us pretty much skated. First time was miserable because she got some long covid, and the kids had to stay home from school. Second time was a million times better because she took Paxlovid and didn’t get long covid (corr != caus, but whatever), and the kids could still go to school.
This time it’s me! I got the T line as soon as the fluid seeped up to the mark, so not even a hint of a doubt. My wife is still negative (for now). Kids can still go to school if they mask.
I feel kinda crappy, but not really any worse than a bad head cold.
Glad you’re doing OK. I’m getting the booster as soon as I’m eligible.
Sorry to hear that, for you and the family too. Like jpinard, my wife and I plan to get a booster again within the month in prep for fall/holidays.
I just got over it for the second time and Ruth for the first. The first time I had it was in the midst of the first peak (Jan '21). I also had a small stroke at the same time, but doctors were divided on whether Covid was the cause. Back then I spent 2 days in the hospital hallway waiting for a room to open up.
This time we probably got it on the plane while returning from a destination wedding. My symptoms were no worse than a bad cold, and Ruth only experienced fatigue. Paxlovid is not available in Mexico, but doctors here still make house calls, so we were able to be fully examined. Lots of liquids, an analgesic and cough suppresent plus rest was all it took to fix me up
I got COVID for the first time in early July. Got paxlovid, but my symptoms were still pretty rough. Week 1 was fever and fatigue. Week 2 was coughing and congestion, highlighted by the worst headache I have ever had in my entire life. That splitting headache turned into a persistent mild headache with accompanying neck pain which lasted until early September.
I really don’t want to get this ever again.
Yeah still get paxlovid. Long COVID remains a concern.