I’ve been careful too, aggressively followed best practices around making and social distancing. If I did go out, I’d always wear a N95 or equivalent and sanitize/hand wash often. I rarely put myself in situations where I’d need to be in public without a mask. I got vaxed and boosted. Short of never leaving the house, I tried to be really careful. I still ended up getting COVID.
The problem isn’t people like us, it’s everybody else who is gleefully acting like there’s not still a pandemic going on and getting the rest of us sick with their carelessness. (And governments including the fed who are trying hard to sweep everything under the rug to give a veneer of normalcy.) The current variants are just so damn contagious that even being careful isn’t a guarantee. I get COVID fatigue is a thing but JFC, people. Have some fucking consideration for others.
Anyway, I hope your luck continues. Getting COVID sucks and I don’t recommend it.
Weirdly enough i haven’t caught it. I was extremely cautious and careful but for the majority of this year i’ve just sort of let my guard down, and i’ve been in crowded stores, in person meetings at work filled with people, etc and i’ve been lucky enough to not have ever come down with COVID. My SO at one point last year caught it through her work… i spent the night at her place before we knew anything was up and the next day she felt sick after i had gotten home and she determined it was COVID so we didn’t see each other while she recovered. I felt 100% fine, and it was during that time when getting tested or finding a reservation to do so was extremely difficult so i just stayed home for 2 weeks just in case but the entire time i felt perfectly healthy so i don’t know if i was asymptomatic or just never caught it.
That said i don’t want to catch it, and i’ve avoided going to concerts and other social events though i’m aware that i should be masking up more often
I have the same one. It serves as a proxy for determining ventilation rates. Ventilation is one of the best protections against COVID transmission, filtration being the other best.
Outdoor levels are typically around 450 ppm, and everything higher indoors is coming from exhalations. So if you’re in a space with other people, higher CO2 readings are essentially telling you you’re breathing other peoples’ breath. Some friends will leave meetings if the reading gets over 1400.
And employers that have decided that it is now YOUR problem. Just found out that I am required to be out for 10 days because I am symptomatic…which means I am not getting paid for almost two weeks, since “We stopped providing COVID recovery time when the pandemic ended” (a kidney stone earlier in the year ate all my accrued sick and PTO). So I am just going to struggle through. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool
Also allegedly covid-free so far, along with my husband. I thought I might’ve had it WAY early in late 2019 because I had the exact symptoms for months, but my PCP hand-waved it away and wouldn’t allow me to get an antibody test. I eventually gave blood at the Red Cross on Christmas Eve 2020 just to find out since they check for that with all donations. It was negative, but it was also 12 months post possible infection, so immunity could’ve waned to undetectable levels.
Our routine is still exclusively takeout, masking indoors and anywhere there’s more than a handful of people we don’t know, like the theater and the amusement park - which sucks, btw. My red line for starting to unmask used to be when daily clinical cases were down to <= 10/100k locally, but now that people’ve stopped reporting infections, that metric is unreliable. All that’s left is wastewater which our county thankfully tracks, and it’s WAY above the national average of 725 copies/mL right now, last recorded at 1,799 copies/mL. I’ve no clear idea what’s a safe wastewater level that would correlate to 10/100k clinical cases, but it might be around 100-200 copies/mL.
So I don’t know if I’d be of any use to their project. It’s also not a questionnaire or anything to fill out, you have to email them a custom message using a generic Contact Us form which doesn’t seem relevant.
Some of the early publications about COVID indicated that asymptomatic carriers were just as contagious as symptomatic carriers, but that doesn’t entirely make sense to me. There are the factors you cite, but also the cellular mechanics of infection. While many of the symptoms we experience during infection are due to the immune response rather than the infection itself, some of the symptoms are directly due to the infection. If someone is truly completely asymptomatic, then that has to mean they have fewer cells being turned into virus factories, which in turn means they should be shedding drastically fewer viral particles.
That would certainly make sense but I’m not aware of a good antibody test against the nucleocapsid protein that doesn’t involve a blood draw. (I found a few of those offered by Labcorp and others) Apparently the testing kit is just a spit cup?
It’s kind of counterintuitive, but in total numbers infected, we may be more infectious when we’re asymptomatic, as most humans aren’t complete assholes (YMMV), so when we are coughing or sneezing we tend to stay away from people (and people stay away from us) whereas when we’re infected but not symptomatic, we may still be producing infectious droplets, but may not shield other people as much as we do when we are symptomatic.
Your allergies may be better due to your mask helping you breathe in less pollen/mold/MAGA hat fibers.
ETA: I did see a communication somewhere that asthma attack rates are less, possibly from the mask, but possibly less people driving too.
Have you gotten tested to see if you’ve ever had it? It seems more likely that you got infected at some point, but you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have any symptoms.
Not necessarily. It could be that you have had Covid, but were exposed to such a low viral load that you never developed any discernible symptoms. This is not the same as having a genetic mutation that prevents you from having symptoms.
I live with an at-risk individual and we’ve been shielding since the start. There’s a very good chance that if I’d gotten it they’d be dead or in the ICU.
Even then it’s still possible to fly under the radar, people have been in close exposure without contraction - so I’d only be 99% sure.
At the risk of jinxing myself, I tested frequently at my work, due to an assortment of reasons. I also donated blood every 8 weeks since the pandemic started and was tested then and those check for the antibodies vs vaccine. I’ve also had multiple cases in the home and close family and as part of testing them, I tested myself. The majority of these were the quick tests, but I’ve had more ‘brain pokers’ then I’d like to over that time.
Thus, my confidence is in the constant testing I’ve had done. Prevention? I wore a mask since it started getting bad, washed my hands, and avoided large groups. Basically followed the guidance. I’m no Superman - I mean, look, I wear glasses and he doesn’t.
Getting COVID sucks and I don’t recommend it.
