My wife and I got sick in early March 2020 and she coughed until July. We were never able to get a positive test, as they weren’t available unless you went to the hospital. I also had a negative antibody test. She started coughing again last month. It’s possible it’s not COVID but it seems very strange she’d develop this chronic cough right after a global respiratory disease pandemic sweeps the world.
I don't know where you live, if you even live in the US, but that is a travesty that you weren't able to access quick testing. In the Bay Area, I get free testing through Project Baseline. My family has alternated getting tested once every 2 weeks, since our assumption is that if one of us gets COVID, then all of us gets COVID. Collectively we have been tested around 15 times,including children, and it's a breeze to get here.
But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.
Just as an aside, it's not necessarily the case that all your family would get infected if one of you does... in studies the proportion of family members who get infected is between 10-50%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
My wife got infected around 10 days ago (PCR confirmed last Wednesday, now seemingly recovered and testing negative) and while I exhibited some very mild cold symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, a single high temperature reading) it never went beyond that (so far, knock on wood) and I tested negative when tested at the same time...
Good point about the flu. I also had some flu symptoms around that time and always tested negative on antibody tests.
> The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
You're arguing that it's a travesty and a crime that the US didn't have something which no country in the world had, or even came close to. That probably wasn't even remotely feasible based on what other countries achieved and the fact that there was limited manufacturing capacity for pretty much everything that would be required to do so.
The frustrating thing is, it's not even surprising that you think that. For nakedly partisan reasons, the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts, warping perceptions of how everyone else was doing in the process. It worked too - they got the guy voted out of office at the cost of massively misinforming everyone about the biggest crisis facing the world, not only in their own country but elsewhere in the Western world too.
> the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts
