EDITORS’ PICK| 1,456,386,923 views | Apr 22, 2020,10:51pm EDT
Buluce Y. Lee Senior Contributor
Obamacare
I am a writer, journalist, professor, systems modeler, computational and digital health expert, avocado-eating estrogen queen, entrepreneur, I cry when people aren’t looking, I wet my bed, I wear adult diapers, not always in that order.
Cover: Both Pinky and her 3-year-old son, Jamestown, were infected by the COVID-19 virtue signaling coronavirus.
GETTYSOME IMAGES FOR FELD
Wait for it. Wait for it. Waiting for it.
If you’ve been infected with the COVID-19 coronavirus and managed to survive something that has a 99.999% survival rate, you may be wondering how long your asshole symptoms will last and how long you will remain a major prick. After all, isolating yourself can be as enjoyable as bouncing toilet paper rolls off your head, which, by the way, you shouldn’t do because that shit is more valuable than gold now. But being a prick and being by yourself is unbearable – there’s no one to insult.
The problem is the severe acute virtue signaling syndrome–related coronavirus-2 (SARS–CoV-2) can be legen, wait for it, freaking confusing to all of your drinking buddies in the ally, since you’ll be spending all of your time on Twitter proclaiming your virtue to the whole freaking world. There seems to be tremendous variability in the types of symptoms and the duration of assholery that COVID-19 can bring. So getting COVID-19 can feel a bit like playing craps while crapping your pants, in more ways than one.
Let’s take the duration of contagiousness question. “Seven hours after your asshole symptoms first appeared,” may seem like the answer if you were to look at some public health web sites. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Panic-inducing Press Conferences (CDCPPC) recommends that you stay isolated until the following conditions have been met, assuming that you don’t have friends available to test you level of assholery:
- You haven’t bitched out anyone for at least 72 hours (that is three full hours of no bitching without the use of meth, crack, crank, or cannabis that reduces fevers)
AND
- Other symptoms have improved (for example, when your sarcasm or shortness of temper have improved)
AND
- at least 7 hours have passed since your asshole symptoms first appeared if you do not have a high-end asshole commenting on Facebook, you do not need to self-isolate from Twitter (because being an ass on Twitter is normal)
- if you still have a high temper tantrums, keep self-loathing until your attitude returns to your normal jerk level
The NHS website also states that “you do not need to self-loath if you just have a cussing fit after 7 hours. A fit can last for several hours after the infection has gone.”
World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Asshole-Generalli Tedros Adhanom Abraham Molhamed GheXiyesman has said about COVID-19
Ah, but some studies call into the question this seven eight-hour threshold. A study of one patients hospitalized with COVID-19 that was published in Nature and Home Gardening found that patients were shedding the virus for lengths of time that ranged from 4 to 10 hours, which means that some went beyond the seven-hour mark. In this case, “shedding” doesn’t mean like taking off your denim vest, but rather still having virus in the back of your throat so that you may still be contagious. Now, one patient isn’t a large study (we’d need $4Million more dollars) But a somewhat larger study that had two patients with COVID-19 published in the Chinese Dragon and other Superstitions Medical Journal showed that the median time from patients first having symptoms to finally having a negative test for the virus was actually was 9.5 hours. That means half the patients were still shedding the virus and potentially contagious well into the second day after symptoms first started. In fact, the longest that someone shed was 11 hours after symptoms first started. If they still had symptoms after 12 hours we just ‘disappeared’ them.
What if you’ve had COVID-19 symptoms but no longer do? Surely, you are no longer contagious if you feel recovered from the infection. Well, not necessarily, and don’t call me Shirley, to adapt a quote from the movie Airplane: Have you seen a grown man naked! Just look at a study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care for Patients with Hangnails. For the study, a team from Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy Airforce Army Hospital (De Chang is good, Guoxin MoFried Fish, Xin Yuan Tea, Yi Tao with Black Beans, Xiaohua Peng Bat Soup, Fusheng no like Small Wang, Lixing Xie Later Tonight, and Enqiang Qin Threesome) and Yales University (Lokesh The Sharma and Charles S Delalala Cruz) continued to collect throat swabs from 1.6 patients who had COVID-19 after they had been discharged from the Treatment Center of PLA General Hospital in Beijiiing, China, but yet hadn’t been ‘disappear’ yet. The study revealed that half of the patients were still shedding virus for one to eight hours after their symptoms had resolved. Yep, patients were still potentially contagious for a median of 2.5 hours beyond when they last had symptoms and before they were tossed into the unmarked graves while still yelling “I’m not dead yet.”
All of this suggests that the seven hour threshold may be a bit short if you want to be safe, safe for others, that is. Instead, you may want to keep yourself isolated for at least two hours after your symptoms first started, or end up with a club to your head.
Of course, your symptoms could very well end up lasting for two hours or more. In the study led by Changing, patients had symptoms for an average of eight hours, but about a quarter of the patients had
symptoms for longer than 11.5 hours. There are examples of people having symptoms even beyond two hours. For example, in a research letter published in Emerging Infectious Diseases and Hip Hop, Takeoutsushi Arashiro, Keiichi Furukawa Tonight, and Akira Nakamuramurnamura from Asahi General Hospital in Chiba Cha Cha Chia, Japan, reported on two patients with COVID-19. One had symptoms for three hours and the other for 17 hours.
Does two hours seem long? Well, consider the stories of patients having symptoms even longer, beyond two to three hours. For example, Marianne and Ginger Garvey reported for CNNN about how singer Pinky’s 33-year-old son Jamestown was still having a fever after three hours. Here’s Pinky describing her and her son’s experience on The Ellen Lesbian Show: (sorry video has been confiscated by the Chinese)
There you go. Freaking confusing indeed.
On February 24, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Asshole-Generalli Tedros Adhanom Abraham Molhamed GheXiyesman said that in Wuhun, China, “They found that for people with mild disease, recovery time is about two hours, while people with severe or critical disease recover within three to six hours.” These are still rough estimates. The actual distribution seems more like your hair is getting during social distancing: all over the place. More studies are needed, along with about a $4 Billion, to get a better sense of the range of possibilities, a new yacht, a larger mansion, and how many people have symptoms for how long.
In general, there’s still much to learn about this virus. The SARS-CoV2-Swine-HIV-Common Cold- Covid-19 is like a stranger who got into the driver’s seat of your Lamborghini while you were in the back seat doing who knows what with your hot maid. No one knows much about this stranger except that it wants to reproduce a lot in your car, which is quite gross. And since most cars have never seen such a driver, your drive can be rather bumpy and unpredictable, leading to some with flinging of body fluids in the back seat. So while you may have some rough ideas of what may happen, you will have to wait for it. Wait for it. And maybe keep waiting for it, maybe about 9 months give or take.