Kevburg, I agree that how many viruses are packed in the exposure is probably a major factor in whether someone gets sick after that exposure. Not only with COVID, but also for flu, colds, and norovirus.
I once got extremely sick hours after bicycling behind someone who did did the farmer’s blow and I actually felt some of the spray on my face. Yep, disgusting. But that was the least of it. Earlier that morning, this guy and his wife had been eating breakfast at the same table with us at the B&B. I remember he said something right after breakfast about the eggs were not sitting well, but he still went on the ride. That afternoon while going home, I felt exhausted. At bedtime I felt worse and worse, with MY dinner feeling like a lead block inside me. Symptoms moved to violent sneezing fits and extremely runny nose, and then quickly went to both diarrhea and vomiting. It was like a compressed version of combined influenza and gastrointestinal big, and later I got pneumonia. Effects lasted a long time.
We later heard that it had raged through many of the participants at that bike festival.
And…more recently, I did get COVID. At the very end of our road trip, I woke up (a Tuesday in the early wee hrs) with an extremely dry mouth, throat, and even lower down than that. I chalked it up to the very long days of driving in extremely arid heat in dusty agricultural country and then staying in a motel room with AC that smelled musty. Nothing more developed that day, when we arrived home and ran around catching up with errands. I had planned to paddle the next day. Woke up feeling off and tired, which I figured was just end-of-trip tiredness. But that afternoon The Cough rolled in. Dry, unproductive, ticklish, irritating, sometimes in violent fits that kept me up at night.
To make a long story short, I tested myself the next day and confirmed it was indeed COVID. During the entire 11 days we had been away, I remembered four people sneezing in my vicinity. The first two happened at the beginning of the trip yet I felt great for a week afterward, so I doubt those were the ones. The third time was on Saturday night in a restaurant when another customer sneezed at the next table, and the fourth time on Sunday night when the woman making my tacos sneezed. She turned around, but still…the short incubation period of the latest variant points to one or both of these times.
I did not paddle for two and a half weeks, at the height of summer. I stayed at home for about a week, till I had to get groceries because by then my husband had also come down with COVID. At least I felt well enough not to cough during that time, and I wore a mask as usual.
It was NOT “just like a cold” in my case. More like influenza, with about the first week the worst, and each week thereafter still easily tired and some nighttime coughing (probably from lying down). My husband had milder symptoms BUT he said he lost his sense of smell for a while.
You don’t know if what you have—or infect someone else with—will be mild, moderate, severe, or fatal. Boating in public areas right after symptoms are gone still ranks as selfish and idiotic, IMO.
