Confessions of recovered COVID-19 patients: I am a doctor and spent six days in a shelter
I lived in the shelter for six days.
I am a fresh graduate and currently working as a doctor in a hospital in Shanghai. Half a year ago, I was infected with the COVID-19 virus and spent 6 days in the shelter hospital.
1. Asymptomatic
In March of this year, the epidemic broke out in Shanghai, and our school began not to allow students to go out. However, medical students who are about to graduate are quite special. They basically have to stay in the hospital during school. After the outbreak, we will still take shifts in the hospital to receive and treat emergency patients .
On April 1, Shanghai entered global static management. The hospital arranges nucleic acid tests every day, and the results of each round of my screening were negative. Later, doctors in the hospital showed positive nucleic acid one after another .
On April 15, I was identified as a close contact. Because the isolation conditions in the hospital were not sufficient, I went home and began to isolate at home, and did nucleic acid testing in the community every day.
On the 21st, positive results appeared in the mixed sample of the building where I lived. The next day, the nucleic acid test results of each household came out, and I was "successful" . Although the test result was positive, I have not noticed any symptoms in the past few days at home.
Suddenly becoming a person infected with the COVID-19 virus, I can’t say how scared or nervous I was, because some of my hospital colleagues and university classmates belonged to the first batch of patients in this round of the epidemic, and some of them had already turned negative and left the shelter hospital.
They are basically between 30 and 60 years old, and they have no serious underlying diseases or poor physical conditions. Most of them have no symptoms or mild symptoms after infection. Everyone in the group will exchange "illness" with each other, so I have expected it in my heart, but it will be easier.
2. The six days spent in the shelter
The dual identity of a student and a hospital employee made my subsequent isolation process much smoother. After reporting to the hospital and the school, I was quickly transferred to the Fangcai Hospital- this isolation point is basically dominated by college students and doctors .
In Shanghai, the people sent to the shelter are basically mild and asymptomatic infections, and those with underlying diseases or severe illnesses will be sent to designated hospitals for treatment.
At that time, many people may not know the difference between mild and asymptomatic. As a non-infectious doctor, this is how I understand it:
The development of the epidemic in Shanghai is at its peak. Patients who are found to be positive in nucleic acid tests will be sent to the shelter hospital for treatment. At the same time, doctors will make judgments by evaluating the patient's physical condition . At that time, the doctor diagnosed me as an asymptomatic infection.
On the day I entered the shelter, the doctor gave me some routine medicines and a pack of antigen tests. The next day, I started to have a cough - similar to a common cold cough, with a bit of a stuffy nose as well .
During this period, I don't know whether the food in the cabin is relatively light, or my sense of taste has been lost, and the food feels tasteless. I brought a few packs of coffee with me and made a cup once in a while. I drank hot water every day, did not do any special treatment, and did not take medicine.
After two days, the cough stopped, the symptoms of nasal congestion eased, and the nose started to runny.
My family and friends greet me through WeChat. They are worried about me, but in fact I don’t have any serious physical discomfort. This may have something to do with my usual exercise and youth .
It was the graduation season, and our working hours were "seven in the morning and five in the evening". After get off work, we had to do scientific research and write papers, which was quite tiring.
After coming to the cabin, I don’t have to go to work, so I spend all my time writing papers. In the cabin, I read books, wrote papers, and tested my own antigens every day. After six days of isolation, I finally returned to negative.
▲Dr. Li's medical certificate for releasing centralized isolation. / Photo courtesy of the narrator
3. Return to normal life
After getting negative certificates for three consecutive days, at the end of April, I was sent to the special isolation hotel of the hospital where I worked—specially used to isolate hospital staff and support close contacts after working in the shelter.
May 15th is my graduation thesis defense day. In order to pass the defense smoothly, I had to stay up all night to revise my graduation thesis. I go to bed at 4 am every day and wake up at 12 noon, so I don't care about "paying attention to my body and taking a good rest". After I had a goal, I found that the days of isolation were actually not as difficult as I imagined.
I stayed in the hotel for 14 days and tested the nucleic acid for 14 days. I ended the quarantine with a full negative certificate.
It has been more than half a year since I came out of the cabin, and I have not found any symptoms of sequelae for the time being.
I have also talked with other people. Everyone mainly has a time difference in the loss of taste, but the loss of taste is not as scary as everyone imagined. It is equivalent to a severe cold or a severe nasal congestion, and the taste of food cannot be smelled. .
Some people lose their sense of taste when they eat for two to three weeks or even a month, while others lose their sense of taste for a much shorter period of time.
Recalling that when I was an undergraduate student, the COVID-19 epidemic had not yet appeared. At that time, I rotated in the hospital and met many elderly people with poor general conditions. Some were patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A "big white lung" is formed in a short period of time.
Perhaps some people's perception of the "big white lung" started from the Wuhan epidemic in 2020, and they thought it was an exclusive word for COVID-19 pneumonia, but it is not.
So now I often tell the elders in my family that even if everyone has a common flu, some people will not be able to survive it.
If you are really infected with the COVID-19 virus, of course you should not take it lightly, it may lead to the aggravation of your original underlying diseases , especially for patients with chronic lung or heart diseases, as well as patients after tumor surgery, more vigilance is required .
Finally, Xiaojiu would like to remind everyone that the situation of the COVID-19 epidemic is still severe, and we should not take it lightly. The COVID-19 virus is not a "little cold" in the eyes of some people. Many studies have found that the COVID-19 virus has a The sequelae of the human body should not be underestimated. I hope that everyone can do a good job in daily protection under such circumstances, and cooperate with the work of epidemic prevention staff to fight against the epidemic together.
The above content is narrated by Dr. Li and compiled from online records. Without the author's permission, reprinting is prohibited.