NWR new zero tolerance covid thread

Tom Cannavan said:
Alex, the beauty of living in a tiny village is that 'big city' rules don't seem to apply, so I could walk into our pharmacy last week and have the flu jab, even though officially the guidance is to wait for the double vax appointment at a health centre. Chatting to the pharmacist and he said he didn't fancy the double jab either and would be having them separately. He didn't expand on reasons other than personal preference, which is a bit like me too: I know quite a few who've had the double vax, and most have been fine.
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Just booked my flu jab. Looks like the local Boots is booked up until late November, so I'm having to go a little further afield.
 
There seems a bit of covid around. I know several with it, including myself last week. At least, so I thought, it wouldn’t interfere with our cottage in Norfolk this week, but no. Now Deb has it! Car packed but wife in bed!
 
Had my booster today but flu wasn't offered. Had it been, I wouldn't have hesitated. Is there any reliable evidence that covid booster x flu jab causes greater side effects than one or the other? I felt quite rough for a couple of days after my second or third covid jab, perhaps if it had been in combination I would have blamed the combination but obviously it wasn't a factor.

Week before last I had five vaccines in two jabs, one in each arm: diphtheria/tetanus/polio and hepatitis A/typhoid. No problems other than a mildly sore arm.

Get well soon Chris, at least by Friday!
 
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As a preamble to the below I will say that I acknowledge the impact that covid has had on so many lives and the awful suffering people who we all know or know of have been through. The below is in no way to belittle or ignore any of that but is simply a comment on my own personal current symptoms which are at worst an inconvenience but I do feel pertinent to the forum.


So forumites, I’ve seen some of you have anosmia and various other symptoms. Whichever strain I have, which would seem to be likely to be introduced from my wife’s trip to a conference in Birmingham last week, it’s suddenly affected my sense of taste and smell after a week.

Three jabs mean I’m very lucky to have experienced flu-like symptoms and nothing more serious, but today I woke up with some changes to my senses. It feels like the virus has been evicted from the torso and retreated into my sinuses.

My ears feel blocked, as does the space right at the very back of my nostrils, yet it is impossible to clear as there’s nothing to get rid of. Throughout the day I’ve been trying all sorts of things to smell and taste

I can smell ‘normally’

Chocolate
Newspaper
Potatoes
Honey
Olive oil
Dried herbs

I can smell with some effort

Bread
Soap
Citrus fruit
Wood
Coffee

I can’t smell ‘normally’ at all

Cheese
Tomato
Toast
Berries
Jam
Cucumber
Tuna!!
Wine!

Of the above list the following taste from nothing to completely and utterly weird

Bread (multigrain granary) - nothing at all
Toast - a little caramel and bran but that’s about it
Coffee - nothing really
Citrus fruit - a very insipid flavour with added soap
Berries - faint flavour is there
Cheese (cave aged cheddar) - horrible, horrible metallic flavour. Vile.
Cucumber - nothing whatsoever
Tomato - very mild for what it is
Tuna - doesn’t taste of tuna but does taste of tin
Olive oil - Sicilian, strong, no flavour at all.
Chocolate- Dark 80% you can taste the constituent parts. Really weird!
Red wine - a Rosso di montalcino 2014 which I opened to see where we are just now. Nothing but the winemaking/winery smells. No fruit. Made the mistake of tasting and spat it straight out.
White wine - fefinanes albarino which I reasoned might get through. No. It smells of parafin, preserved lemons and chemicals. Not in a good way. It tastes the same.
So does a jackson estate sauvignon.
So as a last resort, apostoles palo cortado.

This in the bottle smells correct. Alas in the glass it smells of marmite. I hate marmite. Worse still it tastes of marmite with added parafin and metal.

My conclusion from all of this is that the more complex the aromas/flavours normally found in something, the worse it tastes at present. I’ve heard lots of people say they have lost their taste/smell (which we all know amounts to much the same thing) but I’m not aware of anyone finding things tasting actively terrible.

Perhaps it is my system going ‘don’t be an idiot, you should not be drinking/eating that’ but I feel like that’s unlikely.

Anyhow, make of that what you will, I sincerely hope that none of you get and of you do then your worst symptoms are milder than mine.
 
Chris Hambleton said:
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So forumites, I’ve seen some of you have anosmia and various other symptoms. Whichever strain I have, which would seem to be likely to be introduced from my wife’s trip to a conference in Birmingham last week, it’s suddenly affected my sense of taste and smell after a week.

Three jabs mean I’m very lucky to have experienced flu-like symptoms and nothing more serious, but today I woke up with some changes to my senses. It feels like the virus has been evicted from the torso and retreated into my sinuses.
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Similar what happened to me; when the symptoms were leaving and the lateral flow test started to turn weak, one morning my sense of smell suddenly gone.
Current understanding is that it‘s mainly due to immune response; the immune system clears the infected nasal cells basically by killing them, and some of killed cells are sensory cells.

Not only anosmia, hyposmia and parosmia are also often seen, especially during the recovery process. Luckily most of people can have their sense recovered within weeks.
 
Autumn booster just before our Canada trip and flu jab immediately after. More reaction to the flu jab (flu-like headache etc). We also witnessed the end of the Canadian restrictions; flight over required full masking similarly on public transport then on 1 October all disappeared. Annoyingly, the Mrs was selected for their random testing, however no testing available in airport and there followed a farcical 24 hours with 3 hourly reminders to get tested even though labs not open and then when kit obtained for a zoom-supervised test, technician failed to appear and their "emergency" contact number out of service. Visit to pharmacy then required for the swab test. Interestingly all done by private sector organisations who presumably were paid a substantial amount for what was pretty slapdash (heard that before anyone?) Seems as if international travel is (almost) normal again.
 
Po-yu Sung said:
Similar what happened to me; when the symptoms were leaving and the lateral flow test started to turn weak, one morning my sense of smell suddenly gone.
Current understanding is that it‘s mainly due to immune response; the immune system clears the infected nasal cells basically by killing them, and some of killed cells are sensory cells.
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Just to add that the killing of smell receptors does not just mute smells. It also explains the distortion of the perception of smells, potentially making things smell nasty. What we identify as the smell of something (e.g. raspberry) is due to the pattern created by many different types of receptors firing to different extents. Kill off a few types, and you are left with a different pattern, which may be more similar to something nasty. I use the term "receptors" loosely. The patterns are spatial, and created by groups of receptor cells called glomeruli.

It seems this might be similar to how TCA works too. There is experimental evidence for TCA inhibiting smell receptors in newts (but not for causing any to fire). If that happened to different extents for different types of human cells, it could explain the damp carboard smells we get from corked wine, and the fruit-scalping.

Edit: The newt study is described here, with a link to the research paper. Actually it seems the article authors DID discuss how TCA might affect wine, so I have deleted part of my original post.
www.science.org

Corked Wine Plugs Up Your Nose

It's what you don't smell that makes the bilge water taste bad
www.science.org www.science.org
 
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After all this time the Rona finally got me. I did 3 unvaccinated months working in hospital in the first wave, worked in a vaccine clinic for 6 months seeing hundreds of patients each week and remained untouched. I had some bloods done a few months ago for a research study which suggested that I hadn’t had the virus. I was beginning to hubristically feel that my immune system is innately superior….ha!

My presentation was on Wednesday morning when I had a really nasty but brief episode of uncontrollable shivering, aching and raised temperature (39 degrees seemed pretty sporting to me). This all resolved really quickly - shivering lasted about an hour and by late afternoon the same day my temperature was normal. Wednesday LFT was negative. On Thursday I felt better and LFT was again negative though by late evening I felt like I had a cold coming - fuzzy head, occasional cough. This morning I still felt like I have a mild cold, temperature is normal but LFT was immediately positive.

No smell or taste disturbance so far, so that’s a relief. In fact I have a bottle of 1995 Rostaing Cote Rotie lined up for tonight which I am continuing to plan for opening - I’m showing this virus who’s in charge!
 
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