ABCC NEWS – It started with chills on New Year’s Eve. Hoping a hot shower would help, Dr. Michael Henry stood there, freezing.
“I couldn’t get the water hot enough,” said Henry, 65, recalling his first symptom.
Overnight, he developed a sore throat, followed by fatigue and a cough. A day or two later, something really scared him while taking his first deep breath of the morning.
“It felt like I was sucking through a straw,” he remembered. “This is not normal.”
A home antigen test confirmed his suspicions almost immediately.
Being fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 helped keep him out of the hospital, but just because his symptoms weren’t bad enough for hospitalization doesn’t mean his recovery was a walk in the park.
A pain medicine and rehabilitation specialist with a practice in his hometown of Sacramento, California, Henry joined the growing list of Americans dealing with the virus at home.
Millions of other vaccinated Americans have had to deal with “mild COVID” — not sick enough to require hospital-level treatment, but not asymptomatic.
As cases climb in the U.S., focus remains on the sickest and the nation’s overstretched hospitals and health care workers
But many others are suffering at home and discovering mild COVID to be a major disruptor.
“Mild is not always so mild,” said Dr. William Schaffer, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Disease …
