Was It COVID-19?

Was I infected by COVID-19? I’ll probably never know for sure. According to the CDC, these are the COVID-19 symptoms:

Symptoms that may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus:

• Cough
• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing

Or at least two of the following:

• Fever
• Chills
• Repeated shaking with chills
• Muscle pain
• Headache
• Sore throat
• New loss of taste or smell

The COVID-19 pandemic had been circulating in the United States since last fall. This from a recently published scientific report titled Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2:

Phylogenetic estimates support that the COVID-2 pandemic started sometime around 6 October 2019 – 11 December 2019, which corresponds to the time of the host-jump into humans.

Simply put, COVID-19 was circulating in North America months before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.

We had spent a week at Walt Disney World in January. Towards the end of that week, I had become very ill with what I assumed was the flu. It was horrible. I had never been sick like that before.

On January 14, I had posted about the experience of being sick in a motorcoach here. And this is what I wrote then about my symptoms:

I felt feverish. Severe muscle aches. Extreme fatigue. Awful headache. Coughing. Runny nose. Probably one of the worst ones [influenza] to hit me in quite some time.

For two days, I was so disoriented and dizzy that I couldn’t move. It felt like I was dying. And then I gradually bounced back. Some of the symptoms, especially the coughing, ran on for several weeks.

Was it COVID-19?

I just ran the self-assessment test on the Ontario government’s website and if I had those same symptoms today, I would be told to go in for testing.

Back in January, before all of this became a public health crisis, I thought I had a bad flu. I didn’t even see a need to get checked out by a doctor.

How the world has changed since then.