Coronavirus Survivors tell about the illness

[Anta Assamey]

San Francisco: How coronavirus affects one may depend on various factors like age and underlying illnesses and the accounts of survivors on how the disease hit them also revealed that the experiences may not always be exactly the same.

While one survivor said that she just had the feeling of getting a "nasty flu", another felt he was "one inch from death".

In a Facebook post last week, a 37-year-old Seattle-based woman, named Elizabeth Schneider, said that the total duration of the illness can last 10-16 days.

She said "40 per cent of folks were all sick within 3 days of attending the party".

Explaining her ordeal, Schneider said that she consistently got headache and fever in the first three days and then on and off after three days. She also experienced severe body aches, joint pain, and severe fatigue.

"I had a fever that spiked the first night to 103 degrees and eventually came down to 100 and then low grade 99.5. Some folks had diarrhea," she said.

"I felt nauseous one day. Once the fever is gone some were left with nasal congestion, sore throat. Only a very few of us had a mild itchy cough. Very few had chest tightness or other respiratory symptoms," Schneider said.

Her fever subsided after 10 days of illness.

"I didn't even go to the doctor because I was recovering on my own and felt it was just a nasty flu strain different from the ones I have been protected from with this season's flu vaccine," she wrote in the post.

But for Marc Thibault, a Vice Principal at Saint Raphael Academy in Rhode Island in the US, the illness hit him "like a hurricane".

Thibault, 48, told The Wall Street Journal that he struggled with feeling like he was choking.

"You feel like you're asphyxiating, and you're panicking because you can't breathe," he was quoted as saying.

Thibault added to the newspaper that he was "one inch from death", The Sacramento Bee reported.

Jerri Jorgensen who contracted coronavirus on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, told Fox News she felt no symptoms when she was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.

While the experiences of the illness may differ from person to person, one thing is clear that taking stress or panicking does not in any way help in the recovery.