(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, (arguably) venting]


is the feeling of impending doom because of the sore throat (because they are both being caused by the same medical condition), or is the feeling of impending doom because of the sore throat (because the last time I had this precise flavour of sore throat† it turned out to be COVID, and I have learned an association)

†not the same as the sore throat of the past couple of days!

Comments

[jan_me]

for what it's worth, I have yet to get covid, but I definitely feel impending doom whenever I have a sore throat, even if I'm consistently testing negative for covid.

[brin_bellway]

I used to have impending doom with almost any sore throat, but between the respirators and the pollen bullshit, my priors on a more generic sore throat leading to anything worse have eventually gotten to be pretty low.

My priors on "feeling, for hours on end, like there's something stuck in your throat (though not in a way that actually impedes airflow)" being a sign of bigger problems remain rather higher. (Moment to moment, it's *less* physically unpleasant than the sore throat I woke up with (which was a clear continuation of the last couple of days), but mentally it's a lot more concerning.)

[lydamorehouse]

OMG, me too. I have never (knowingly) had COVID (I suspect the whole household had asymptomatic COVID in the wee early days of the pandemic, as Mason, our son, developed "COVID toes.") But any hint of a sore throat sends me to a test.

[jan_me]

Interesting. My family's actually had two cases of covid, but we isolated really well and tested daily (god, remember when the government supplied rapid tests? I can't believe they stopped), and it never spread.

[brin_bellway]

>>(god, remember when the government supplied rapid tests? I can't believe they stopped)

I mean, to be fair they're a lot less useful after a couple years of heavy selective pressure towards strains with high false-negative rates, especially for Jess Q. Public who is just following the instructions on the card and not swabbing their throat or coughing on the swab or anything. (Indeed, my brother's first (and, for weeks, only) test was negative, and I learned too late that not only he but my *parents* were placing way too much stock in that.)

I tested my case of COVID purely to see if I could get the psychological closure of knowing for certain (I could: it was positive), but if it had been negative I would *still* have given better than 50/50 odds that it was COVID-19. I did not test-to-release, though for a couple weeks after leaving quarantine I refrained from drinking any water at work so as not to break the seal on my anti-egress P100, in case I was more ill than I seemed.

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That all said, last I checked (around December or so), my local pharmacy still had some boxes of government rapid tests left: the stock hadn't been *refreshed*, but they weren't *unusably* old.

I saw recently that you can get them (possibly only by the case, 138 5pks?† it's a bit ambiguous) from the Canadian government-surplus online store: I wonder if that's open to random individuals, and how much the shipping costs.

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†Pull together two dozen friends and get 5 - 6 boxes each?

[jan_me]

Yeah, sadly much less effective.

I didn't know about the surplus thing though- I'll definitely be looking into that.