Thanks Neil. Much appreciated. I might look into the Superdrug option.
They have stopped doing it, oversubscribed !
Thanks Neil. Much appreciated. I might look into the Superdrug option.
No idea - don't know and don't want to know. Had a fairly short but very severe (in my experience) bout of flu-like symptoms in February but that's all.
I'm not sure. Colds don't normally get me hard but early in the new year I had an absolute stinker, lots of coughing, temperature, aches and pains. I assumed it was just a bad cold but if our new friend was already spread far and wide by then without knowledge then maybe I have had it.
Or maybe it was just a nasty cold.
I'm intrigued if there was a particularly bad cold around, as a lot of people say this, as did I, but my private COVID antibody test came back negative.
I had a bout of something in mid-February, I assumed it was a seasonal virus. Aching, tired beyond belief, at first physically but then it moved to a drained mental tiredness. A temperature for about three days (but not consistent, on and off), and a tight, wheezy chest. I was just waiting for the persistent cough, which never came.
So have I had Covid or was it just another winter virus? No idea.
there has been talk of two strains of COVID, one deadly and one not, which I find interesting...
That was proven to be untrueThere has been discussion in the media that some people may have had COVID twice. This could be down to the fact that the positive test apparently continues to show for a few weeks after the infection as stopped, something to do with coughing out the dead lung tissue. Nice. (I seem to recall this mentionned in one of the Downing Street briefings, or in an interview on BBC just before the briefing commenced).
Or perhaps that indeed there are two strains and having had one doesn't preclude catching the other.
There was some mention iirc back in Feb or March that as you say there were two strains, a mild and a deadly. The suggestion was that the mild spreads fast but doesn't generally cause life threatening circumstances in those that don't have underlying health conditions. The deadly form however was harder to catch, not necessarily because it isn't as infectious, but because it was so deadly it actually killed people fairly quickly and thus defeated itself by being too successful, killing before it could spread more widely. Now I can't remember where I read that or if it is scientifically true, so much is hard to pin down these days. But I seem to recall those were the findings coming out of Asia. I definitely read it before the lockdown commenced in March though.
Tests carried out on almost 300 patients strongly imply that they have acquired immunity after becoming infected, in a major boost to hopes of overcoming the pandemic.
The South Korea Centre for Disease Control and Prevention examined 285 Covid-19 survivors who had recovered, tested negative and then tested positive for a second time.
Some coronavirus patients have tested positive again up to 82 days after becoming infected, but the South Korean lab found that people who tested 're-positive' were not found to have spread any lingering infection.
Virus samples collected from them could not be grown in culture in the lab, indicating that they were shedding non-infectious or dead virus particles.
The research shows that antigen tests – swab tests taken to see if somebody currently has Covid-19 – cannot distinguish between dead and viable virus particles, potentially giving the wrong impression that someone who tests positive remains infectious...
That was proven to be untrue
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...ents-tested-positive-twice-cannot-pass-virus/
One symptom that doesn't appear on the list but I had from the 7th was having this foul stench in my nose. It was like something was dying or decaying, I noticed it in work and at home as well.
I also noticed that my sense of taste felt off, I had beans on toast and the sauce tasted syrupy sweet.
There have been a couple of papers implying likely T-cell immunity for those who have had previous coronaviruses - so possibly 40-60% of the population would already be immune to, or only have a very mild version of, the current nastier virus. (An ancient equivalent would be cowpox/smallpox).
From https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...land-from-15-june.205120/page-39#post-4625367
I'm wondering if this is the case for me. I have had symptoms similar to COVID19 - twice in fact - but mild and short-lived. They were quite unusual (and extremely unpleasant) symptoms and not ones I usually get - the only time I normally ever get sick is a cold (about 6-8 times a year or so), and they always follow exactly the same symptom pattern over 4-5 days. But I paid for an antibody test, and that was negative.