Have you deliberately exposed yourself and your children to covid yet? Why or why not?

How was the progression of the disease for the 10 friends of yours that had it?

These are great questions.

1. No I have not. Quite honestly I haven’t had the opportunity, but I have considered it. Early on, I didn’t want to because I was certain the ICUs were going to be flooded and we’d be in triage, and I didn’t want to end up in that situation. Now that ICUs seem like they’ll probably never get to that point, I would really like to just catch this thing and get it over with.
2. The progression has varied. This is NOT like the flu, it is much worse, for most people I’ve spoken to who knew they had it. I’ve spoken to others who I don’t hold in my 10 count yet who think they may have had a milder version.

To share some specifics, which I have shared with everyone I’ve talked to. I think the milder versions of this, which include many people I don’t hold inside that 10 count, are done in a week. For some people, they think they’re about to get over it, and then it comes back for another week. If the second week hits them harder than the first, it’s likely they end up in a third week. There seems to be a general 7 day cycle, where you think you’re getting better, and then either you do or you don’t, and if you don’t it might be very bad.

The worst friend was patient zero in her small town in Chile, and she was in quarantine for 29 days. She said it was the worst experience of her life.

The symptoms are all over the place too. Some get the respiratory mud, some don’t. Some get very bad gastrointestinal problems, some don’t. Some fevers, some not. Most get headaches. All seem to get intense body aches and intense loss of energy and appetite. Loss of smell and taste seems to be quite common.

It’s not the flu. It’s worse and it sucks.

(Have we worked out an accurate age distribution, yet, for hospitalization or other serious complications?)

You can go to the Georgia Department of Public Health’s website and see a dataset that includes all deaths. Window it, copy/paste into Excel. It includes age and comorbidity status. There’s sort of a bell shape to the deaths by age bracket that peaks in the 70s band. The CFR of those in their 80s and above is higher, but there are less people in those bands because many have already died of some other cause, which is the source of the bell shape. The deaths hit around retirement age. If a mad scientist were to concoct a virus that would hit retired people and kill them to make social security solvent again, it would look like Covid-19.