pantyfire wrote:

Sorry to hear this as well Jon. My father in law died two years ago. He had Parkinson’s for over 25 years. My wife and I lived with and looked after him daily for his last ten years. He was very conscious of the tremors etc…in the beginning and wasted time not wanting to go out and do things. Time he regretted as the disease progressed enough to actually stop him going out and doing things. So my advice. Do everything he wants to do now, don’t put it off. No one gives a shit that your hands or leg tremors a bit. Just travel, eat out, visit family in New Zealand, do the things you’ve always wanted to do etc… while you can. Because there WILL be a time when he wont he able to do them. The FiL also developed Parkinson’s dementia and was confined to a chair for his last 5 years. Being fed via a peg (feeding pump directly into the stomach), he literally had a couple of minutes a day when he was ‘dad’ and couldn’t even enjoy tv, music or muster the wherewithal to have a newspaper read to him. By the end he was just… ‘there’. I am not belittling the situation in any way shape or form but be relieved it’s been diagnosed at such an advanced age. It usually takes many years to become totally debilitating and with medication he will likely live a relatively normal life until it’s his time to go via other natural causes.

Cheers for that.

That's amazing.

Sorry to hear that Goobs.
The pharmacist told me that this year's flu season is likely to hit hard as we've all been wearing masks and ideally social distancing so our immune systems won't have had a chance to build up against it yet.

I've booked a flu vaccination for next week just in case

Aye, the same thing caught me out a while ago. Basically the LFTs are something you do weekly just to be sure you're not asymptomatic. Somehow they don't work if you have symptoms, which makes absolutely no sense to me

60% of the time, they work every time.

GooberTheHat wrote:

LFTs are apparently 95% accurate with symptomatic patients.

The quick response to that is that the official guidance remains that anyone with symptoms must isolate and get a PCR test, and that LFT should be reserved for asymptomatic people only.  So Unlikely's advice is sound.

There's a longer answer which is that the question of accuracy of LFTs is a complicated one, but you're right that there's a study suggesting they're 95% accurate in symptomatic people.

So let's start with that study.  The "95% accurate" is actually a reference to one specific result, which is the sensitivity of the test.  95% is obviously really good (only 5% are missed). Some of the other figures are still good, but maybe not quite so great, so for instance the negative predictive value (the likelihood that a negative test truly means you don't have the disease) is 82.5%.

That's still impressive, and much better than the "about the same as flipping a coin" quote that many throw out there.  (And which I've certainly used in the past).  There are a couple of things to remember with this study though.  Firstly, that it's tests carried out by a doctor.  These aren't your regular "I wiggled a swab about in my throat until I vomited but don't know if I did it right" LFTs that people tend to do at home. Equally there is known to be quite some variation between different testing kits - the Lancet study used 5 different kits, though notably didn't include, for instance, the Innova kits that are sitting across from me on my desk right now as an NHS staff testing kit. 

Innova was used for the study in Liverpool which lead to the "flip a coin" stuff.  That quote comes from a finding of just 40% sensitivity in asymptomatic people, which clearly puts the tests somewhat into question. It's worth noting that all the evidence from that trial/pilot was that the higher the viral load, the more likely you are to have a positive result, so it's not necessarily contradicting the Lancet study.  (Symptomatic people will, generally, have higher load)  None the less it means that doctors are nervous of relying too much on LFT for diagnosis in people who have symptoms of Covid - particularly when the swab has been taken by someone who is perhaps inexperienced.

So, tl;dr it's still worth getting a PCR.

PCR booked. Badgering badgers.

Woke up this morning with tight shoulders and upper back, pain and stiffness all day.  Headache, now startin to feel a bit dizzy and nauseous.  Maybe it's the lack of sleep and the work stress?

Haven't slept much/well in recent nights.  Stressed to the gills with one of our biggest ever (and very lucrative) deals at work.  Fucking working day and night, will probably continue for a few days then relax from Monday.

GooberTheHat wrote:

PCR booked. Badgering badgers.

Glad to hear it.  Hopefully it will be normal, and in either case I hope you're all feeling much better very soon.

I’ve genuinely never had a headache.

davyK wrote:

Had a mild migraine yesterday. Last one I had was in 1982. Fuck sake. Nothing like the few humdingers I had in my late teens. But had the vision impairment and then some pain over one eye, followed by nausea. Pain still lurking around this morning - get a pulse over my eye if I clear my throat or anything. Not eating, being cold and looking at a pattern like graph paper grids was the trigger back then. (One was triggered in my mock O level Maths). Was a bit cold yesterday but I wouldn't put it down to that. Weird.

Migraines are fucking dreadful. I don't have them often, but not sleeping+stress+chocolate+caffeine would send me to a dark room at work. Explaining them to people who don't have them is also strange, because it does sound like you're having a stroke...

'Oh it's just my vision is really blurry/spotty in one eye, and my speech gets a bit slurred, and then extreme light sensitivity, all followed by throwing up and a blinding headache that sometimes lasts till the next day... don't worry'

I've had many a migraine over the years. I know that my trigger is lack of sleep, if I have several nights of either low quality sleep or insomnia I will start to get the usual migraine symptoms. That's my cue to get to bed and try and sleep. If I can't then they develop into full blown migraines and I have to lay very still in a dark room in absolute silence for fear of vomiting or my head exploding. The room spins, my vision blurs and light feels like red hot pokers going straight into my eyes.

It's the worst

Migraines make me genuinely wish for death as a sweet release

I've learned as I age what the causes are and what the early warning signs feel like. If I catch it before it has a chance to develop and manage to sleep its like hitting a big old reset button and I wake up fresh as a daisy

Still waiting on the results.