My wife, son, many extended family members have flu like symptoms - cold, one day fever, headache, body aches, tired. Must be contagious. Most have been vaccinated.
This thing seems to be far more contagious than COVID. I've had had it, almost everyone I know has had it, many on this forum have had it. I don't recall the flu or common cold being so aggressively spread in this country. I think it could be the new COVID variant. Testing is not very reliable with this variant. (My bother-in-law recently tested positive for COVID but when my sister, their daughter, and my other sister got the exact same symptoms they did not get a positive result.)
It is definitely going around, and obviously super contagious, I literally don't know anybody who hasn't had it in the past month. Thankfully it does seem to be a pretty mild bug and goes away within a few days. There was speculation that if you are vaccinated and exposed to omicron that this is what you might experience. My sister in-law just came down with this over the weekend and I asked her to go get tested right away, and she did. The test was negative. This makes me lean towards the belief that this is just a mild, highly contagious type of flu that is hitting just about everybody.
I understand the urge to compare a new illness with something we know, especially when things come really close, but I am not aware of any strain of the influenza (flu) virus leaving around one in twenty patients with lingering symptoms for more than a year, which all strains of Covid-19 before Omicron did. I share the hope that Omicron won't similarly disable some patients longer term, but it is definitely too early to conclude that. We simply don't know enough yet. Therefore I would hope people will continue to try to protect themselves and others against getting infected. As for personal experiences, whereas among friends and family in the Netherlands there have been multiple Covid cases, and my brother died from it last May, here in the Philippines there have been hardly any cases among friends, family and neighbours so far.
My Wife and I also fell ill. It seems more like a common cold and of coarse we did not go to a hospital because that's the easiest way to get more sick. Almost all the folks around us have it. No one has died of this bug so far. Good to have learned that after a few weeks of having a cough and still chunking up sputum that's yellow...... do go to a Doctor and get a prescription for pneumonia. We do know 2 persons that developed it and died here!
