My Wife Tested Positive in a Pool and Developed Flu-Like Symptoms
A few days ago, the market we usually go to was locked down; reportedly a cluster infection had occurred, requiring a seven-day closure. On Saturday evening (December 10), a neighbor next door hurriedly carried a sick family member on a stretcher out to a Jinbei van and drove them to the hospital, and I felt it was only a matter of time before we turned positive. This Monday (December 12), my wife needed to return to school for work; under Beijing's rules, staff returning to campus require a negative nucleic-acid test within 48 hours, so she had to be tested on Sunday (December 11).Before she went, I told her that this test had an 80–90% chance of being a pooled positive, that results might not appear for many days, and that the chance of being infected at the testing site was high. Better, I said, to delay it, skip the test, talk to the school, and try not to return, sending documents by same-day courier. But the school was rigid and not easily flexible, so she had to go to a nearby testing site.I told her that as soon as she finished the test, she must come home and drink two cups of hot water, until she sweated lightly. But she did not obey; she came back over an hour after the test, and only then did I make her drink hot water. Sunday night she began sneezing with slight nasal congestion, and Monday morning the congestion continued mildly with dizziness. I told her to drink more hot water; she didn't take it seriously, but under my insistence she drank, reluctantly.Monday morning her phone received a government text notifying her of the pooled positive. Only then did she panic, hurriedly drinking cup after cup of hot water; when plain water wouldn't go down, she drank hot tea. Within two hours she drank about a liter and a half of hot water and broke into a light sweat all over. I then forced her to stop working and rest in bed. By lunchtime all her symptoms had disappeared.But in the afternoon she had slight dizziness again; I plucked a few leaves from the mint we grow at home and brewed them for her to drink, then told her to sleep. Monday afternoon, the child also developed slight dizziness and fatigue, and I handled him the same way. While symptoms were still mild, I had him drink large amounts of hot water to sweat, then pull the covers over his head and sleep. I also asked his teacher to excuse him from homework. Among the child's classmates and teachers, a large swathe have already been infected, so several classes had to combine for online lessons because there weren't enough teachers who were still fever-free.Ever since my wife developed flu-like symptoms, I myself have been drinking hot water; Monday morning I drank about two liters, sweating from time to time. So these two days I have had no symptoms at all; I've done all the housework alone, and can still bound up and down the stairs carrying heavy things. This morning (December 13), the child and his mother woke up clear-headed and energetic, with no symptoms at all and no fever throughout.These days I require the family to drink 2–3 hot drinks daily—sometimes plain water, sometimes hot chicken or pork-rib soup—until a light sweat. I also urge everyone to exercise daily until sweating thoroughly. I don't know whether the three of us did not catch Omicron, or whether we simply brushed it off this lightly.After my wife's pooled positive, once the school saw the text she received, the previously inflexible school suddenly became flexible and told her she need not return. She won't need another test in the short term, and I can't be bothered to have her find a place for a re-test or buy antigen kits. Her colleague volunteered to send us medicine and antigen tests, which I politely declined as unnecessary. But I did fully charge the electric bike at home, just in case. We don't have a car; if mother and son develop something I can't handle that needs a ventilator, I can use it to take them to the hospital.I have always valued prevention over treatment. The key to preventive medicine is "preventing disease before it arises, and preventing deterioration once it arises." Moderate exercise plus drinking plenty of water, breaking a little sweat every day, makes the constitution much stronger; I myself carry this principle through completely, so in this outbreak I alone in the family have had no symptoms. Once illness appears, at the very first sign you must act without delay, never just waiting for it to progress. As long as you respond in time and act properly, it can be intercepted. Whether this time it was influenza or COVID for them, in any case the methods we've long stuck to worked.Omicron does cause aftereffects. First, a large body of data on Omicron sequelae is already out (I will later write a separate article on these data and study treatments for long COVID); second, through my work I have personally seen several patients with Omicron sequelae—patients who came to me for treatment, as well as my own classmates and friends.A classmate of mine in Australia has had noticeably lower stamina since catching Omicron. An acquaintance who wholesales medicinal materials caught Omicron two months ago somewhere in Hebei, recovered, and now frequently becomes breathless. Another father and daughter, after infection, one developed myocarditis and the other has projectile vomiting from time to time, and they came to me for treatment. Their aftereffects basically appeared two months after infection, consistent with international reports. Seeing is believing, so no matter how eminent the academicians and experts who deny Omicron aftereffects, I treat their words as nonsense.COVID aftereffects are complex: some develop myocarditis, some neurological symptoms, some very high blood viscosity, some breathlessness after slight exertion, some profuse sweating, fatigue, easy tiring, and frequent colds, some brain fog, memory decline, and depression. According to data from other countries, overall, short-term aftereffects may affect 10–20% of the whole population, long-term aftereffects about 1%, and the fatality rate about 0.1% of the whole population (one in a thousand). Here, "the whole population" means not the number infected but the total population of a country or region. So the international medical community is generally worried about the downstream medical burden of COVID.To lower the chance of aftereffects, the key is to intercept fever. The key to intercepting fever is to do sweating exercise and drink plenty of water in daily life, and to act promptly at the first mild symptom—not to rely entirely on your own immunity. The effective auxiliary methods I've described are no worse than any drug. Here I must emphasize that I keep talking about sweating. TCM has eight major treatment methods, and the first is the sweating method. For colds, TCM uses either acrid-warm or acrid-cool exterior-releasing methods; both work by inducing sweat to break the fever. The fever reducers we commonly take, such as Tylenol and ibuprofen, also work by inducing sweat to reduce fever and pain. If we sweat more in daily life, our resistance to infectious diseases will be far stronger.Last night, a friend from my hometown who works at a top-tier hospital in Wuhan also turned positive, at one point spiking a fever above 38.5°C. He holds a biology postdoctorate and often reads my articles. This time he had chills and, despite drinking lots of hot water, could not sweat; so he boiled ginger and garlic in water to drink, and after that he sweated and the fever broke. His colleagues relied on ibuprofen, but their fever returned soon after; his, once broken, did not recur. So it doesn't matter if you can't grab medicine: water boiled with ginger, scallion, and garlic can all help break a fever.Another friend in Wuhan specifically messaged me to share her family's fever-breaking experience. When family members have a fever, they generally handle it like this: by day, while soaking the feet in hot water, every half hour they wipe the patient's body with lukewarm water, especially the armpits and groin where lymph nodes sit; one wiping usually brings the temperature down, and when it rises again they wipe again with lukewarm water. At night they do the same, only without the foot soak.But these are all ways to break fever; personally I value preventing fever more. Prevent early when well, treat early when ill. The milder the symptoms, the easier they are to treat, so everyone should watch their body closely and act the moment anything feels off—far better than dragging on until fever and then scrambling to break it.