Honestly, I thought I was probably immune at this point.I mean sure, I got the first vaccine back and the first booster in 2021 but after that nothing. Managed to avoid getting after my wife and son went through it. I remember finishing his half eaten apple the day before he tested positive!
Well finally happened, holy shit no joke. First day I was basically in the fetal position with a 40° fever in full sweatsuit and blanket just writhing. Didn’t sleep much for like 30 hours. Things felt a lot better day 2 until the blocked nose and everything starting tasting super bland. Most surprising almost no cough for me.
It’s now day 3 and I feel almost fully recovered, I assume 1 or 2 more days and I’ll be fine. Sort of relieved to get it over with but really don’t want to go through that again. Just in case there are others out there like me 3.5 years COVID free, we are probably more lucky than immune.
Anyway, don’t know why I posted this other than the fact I’m starved for attention after isolating for 3 days in my room.
I thought it was Long Covid too at first, but what happens to me doesn’t seem to fully align with what happens to others that clearly have Long Covid. I don’t have brain fog or lack of energy once I’m better, or any of the other common ailments.
It’s more that when I do get Covid it just…lingers, at a mild level. I basically start with the dry cough and loss of appetite, and have that for a week or two, then the fever/aches/caffeine intolerance develops (the fever being spiky rather than sustained), and sometimes gastro stuff, and those all bounce about like popcorn in a popcorn maker with brief periods of feeling totally ok while still dry coughing, then those go away while the dry cough remains for another few weeks. It’s like I have this long dry cough intro/outro each time I get Covid. Whereas with a common cold, it’s here and gone in 1-1.5 weeks with a clear, fast ramp-up and ramp-down and sharper, more-obvious symptoms.
With Covid, in between cases–when the dry cough has finally ceased–I’m back to normal. Totally fine. Then six or seven months later I pick Covid up again. As far as I’m aware, that’s not the pattern for Long Covid. (Although I could be wrong…I gave up researching it a while back when it was clear I probably wasn’t going to get the really bad effects others got.)
I did that DNA test with 23andMe, and Ancestry, and I have some markers that make me resistant to certain other common viruses, so I half-wonder if they also have some mitigating effect with Covid that’s yet-undiscovered. I’ve never lost my sense of smell or taste with Covid, for example, and I was sick in early 2020 when the severe versions were still running around.
Long Covid is an umbrella term anyways. CFS is just the most common one. And even that can be very mild.
I think I actually very mild CFS before I got Covid. It kinda sounds like what you describe. I’d get cold-like symptoms very often. Reliably after exercising too much. But I didn’t have brainfog or anything else. That just came after Covid.