Covid-19: How My Coronavirus Symptoms Progressed

I just felt…different. Something was off, but I couldn’t say what exactly. I even told my wife that day that I just felt…weird. I didn’t feel sick exactly, more like I was not myself. A few days later I would get confirmation of what I suspected — I had contracted Covid-19.

It’s now been three weeks since those first symptoms appeared. The most impactful symptoms lasted about two weeks. While I was recovering, I decided that when I felt better, I would write something about my own experience, to provide something useful for anyone else who contracts Covid-19. So here we are. In this post, I group my symptoms into stages — some lasting a day, some several days — based on when symptoms changed.

Note: From my own experience, and from reading other people’s accounts of recovery, Covid-19 symptoms vary greatly from person to person. Thus, this post serves only to provide a subjective account of one person’s experience. I was fortunate in that I only experienced ‘mild’ symptoms. Others are not so fortunate. So…Wear a mask, wash your hands, social distance, and take care of each other.

Stage 1 (1 Day)

The very first symptom I had was fatigue. I was extremely tired. I didn’t have a fever. No cough. Just tired. As someone who had very few recent close contacts, I didn’t think much of it.

Stage 2 (1 Day)

This was the strangest day of all. I have thought about how I felt on this day, and how I might describe it, but I can’t come up with the exact description. As I said to my wife on the day, I just felt weird. I felt off. Something was not right. I did not feel sick in the regular way we might imagine. I just felt ‘not myself’. Super strange.

Stage 3 (1 Day)

The weird feeling from the previous day was gone. I was fine…until the late afternoon. Then my muscles started to ache. Seriously. I had never felt generalized body pain and aches like this. The pain was constant in some places — my legs — and came in waves in other places — my lower back.

Stage 4 (1 Day)

More aches and pains. And now also a headache. No improvement. I was taking as much paracetamol as possible, up to the…