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The danger is approaching: with each encounter the likelihood of spending the next few days in quarantine or isolation increases. This leads me to various calculations.
Some things cannot be grasped.
In the weekly column “The main thing, health”, the authors take a personal look at topics in medicine, health, nutrition and fitness.
I find myself trying to understand all the risks all the time. More and more friends test positive for Sars-CoV-2 or have had contact with infected people. I think about the last time I saw her or the likelihood that there was an infection, for example if I meet my friend again, who has had contact with someone who tested positive but is not quarantined according to official criteria.
Infectivity increases at most three to five days after infection. The likelihood of being infected with someone infected in the same family is between 10 and 40 percent, depending on the study, while sleeping in the same bed is between 30 and 40 percent. One in four people who are tested is currently positive. So it shakes me in the head until I arrive at an absurd value that doesn’t help me further.
The highest infectivity before the first symptoms appear
Contagiousness in the days …
I’m not afraid for myself, at least mostly. But I continue to monitor Covid-19 mortality, which can hardly be avoided for professional reasons. Now I see: Of women my age, only 4.4 out of 10,000 infected people die, which I find reassuring. There are already more than 10 men, but my husband will not be among them, even though he has a higher risk as a heavy smoker. When I think of my parents and in-laws, it gets more serious when one or two in 100 people die in their age group.
It is always others who must be concerned in this pandemic, the elderly and young people at risk, and of course the health system. But we also hear about dramatic cases in which previously healthy middle-aged adults are sick for months after mild Covid-19 illness. They complain of debilitating fatigue and other severe impairments. While this can happen very rarely, it is concerning.
There was also talk of a small German study that found signs of myocarditis in patients with Covid-19 and healthy people with asymptomatic infections two to three months after the test result. Whether this is relevant to health and how often these abnormalities occur in most Sars-CoV-2 infected people with a mild course remains uncertain.
A British study recently published as a preprint provides an indication of how common long-standing complaints are in young people. The researchers evaluated data from an app used to study the epidemiology of Covid-19. Meanwhile, more than two million users regularly answer questions about their condition, regardless of whether they have ever been infected. The app has a disproportionately large number of women and young people among its users.
Of nearly 4,200 people infected with Sars-CoV-2 in the study, 13% had symptoms that lasted more than four weeks. The most common complaints included fatigue, headache, shortness of breath and olfactory disturbances. For two percent, this lasted more than 12 weeks.
I’m not very worried about fatigue and headaches, especially as it remains to be seen if these frequent symptoms are really related to the infection. I would like to avoid shortness of breath and olfactory disturbances. And so I try to keep my distance from potentially infected people and to continue my absurd calculations.
Texts that have already been published under the title “Main thing, healthy” can be found here.
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