COVID-19 Symptom Timeline

The facebook user Yvette Esmerelda made a helpful video documenting her COVID-19 progression of symptoms.

https://www.facebook.com/esmeralda.paz.58/videos/10222992424499486/?hc_location=ufi

Days 1, 2 - Woke up with headache in eyes and temple, like a hangover muscles aches in chest and back, minor dry cough.

3 - Sore throat like shards of glass, coughing with chest pain and gasping for air. Coughing until you want to vomit (this sounds like whooping cough).

Went to hospital, got tested.

She was told to wait 4 days for a result.

4 - started to get better, but self-quarantined

5, 6, 7 - got better during self-quarantine.

8? -the waiting period for the results ended. Went out with friends and family. (ed. I'm not sure about the day.)

8 or 9 - got phone call from health department with positive result. Went to hospital.

As she made the video, indicated that she has pneumonia.

----

The main thing I noticed is that she was told to wait 4 days for a result, and if there was no response, she was negative.

They called her on the 5th day, with a positive result.

Obviously, the public health departments and private labs are overwhelmed with tests, and there's a lag in testing.

So, the patient should be self-quarantining longer than 4 days. I would just wait 14 days.

14 days is how long they're having people quarantined, to wait for an onset of symptoms.

In Los Angeles, and California in general, there's a "stay at home" law where people aren't supposed to go out except for necessary trips. This is almost like a home quarantine.

A person with symptoms should do a home quarantine, where they don't leave the home at all. If they live with someone else, don't even leave the bedroom. Stay isolated, and receive food at the door. Sanitize the interior daily.

This is the CDC recommendation. It's also rational, given that scientists are only learning this disease.

Also, the US is lagging in testing, and far behind where we need to be. The country doing the best with testing is South Korea, which is doing around 10,000 tests a day.

In the US, the state of California has concluded only 11,000 tests in total, and have another 11,000 in progress. Given that it takes 3 or more days to process a test, we can assume that our capacity in this state of 40 million people is only around 3000 tests per day.

The capacity is growing, but it will never catch up to the infection (until the infection declines because many people are already infected).

Because there isn't enough testing capacity, it's not possible to "contain" the infection. It's a simple physical impossiblity.

Think of it as teachers trying to manage a crowd of students.

Imagine you have 10 teachers trying to monitor 10 students, and the crowd is doubling every two days.

On the first day, you can manage it.

In two days, you have 20 people.

In four days, you have 40 people.

In six days, you have 80 people. This may still be manageable, with 1 teacher per 8 students.

In eight days, you have 160 people.

In 10 days, you have 320 people. At this point, you have one teacher per 32 students.

In 12 days, you have 640 people. At this point, each teacher is responsible for 64 students, and is completely overwhelmed.

This is called exponential growth.

The growth of the infection has already exceeded our testing capacity, even in California.

In order for containment to work, you need enough testing capacity for a population to detect the infection and take action to contain it.

Because we didn't have much testing capacity at the start, and the president's administration refused to take offer from the WHO to get tests, we have never had sufficient testing capacity.

The two countries using testing to contain the virus are Taiwan and South Korea. You can look it up.

SK and Taiwan might be able to completely manage the spread of disease in their countries.

Everyone else must settle for a whole different strategy, of "mitigation" or "flatten the curve", and the main tool for this is "lockdown" or a voluntary self-quarantine that keeps people separated from each other.

If people maintain "social distancing" and generally do not congregate, the virus has little to no opportunity to spread.

This is why California is basically under lockdown, and it will be so until May, at least.

The assumption of the lockdown is simple: we don't know who is infected, and must assume everyone is infected. Additionally, we, as individuals and households, must assume that we are infected, and do not want to spread the virus.