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That is almost exactly my normal temperature. I don't know most of what goes on after the trainwreck of illness gets underway. Someone else will have to tease out the common features and stages. This beast is complicated. By the time this is finished, we will have a much better understanding of immunology and pathology. This illness crosses all sorts of boundaries between specialties.
Part of the trouble is an army of people who regurgitate what they were taught in med. school. "This is how a viral disease works." or "This is how a retrovirus works." Those who were in the trenches during the fight against the diseases that produced textbook examples were much less rigid. Poliomyelitis was known long before anyone had a way of imaging a tiny virus. It failed many of the existing tests for infectious disease, causing Koch to revise his postulates. The Rous sarcoma virus was found long before anyone knew about retroviruses, or DNA for that matter, and the cause of any cancer was a complete mystery. Even after DNA was discovered, the "central dogma" of molecular biology was that information flowed from DNA to RNA, not the reverse. This is an important exception. I have lived long enough to remember polio epidemics. I don't have to go far back in memory to turn up statements that "cancer is not contagious". I now hear doctors say that cervical cancer can be completely prevented by vaccinating for HPV. "What about prostate cancer?", I ask.
Almost any prediction of a highly specific course of pathology is likely to be falsified in our current state of ignorance. One tactic of the deniers is to provoke people into committing themselves to such a prediction, by saying hypotheses are too vague to be tested, then demolish that, along with their reputation. We still hear that DeFreitas claimed to have found HTLV-2, and that tests showed this was not present. If you read her published work in detail, you will find she said the virus she found was not HTLV 1 or 2, merely that it shared some characteristics and sequence similarity. She actually tested for them. She isolated virus, but she never finished characterizing it. No one else was willing to take up her work.
Part of the trouble is an army of people who regurgitate what they were taught in med. school. "This is how a viral disease works." or "This is how a retrovirus works." Those who were in the trenches during the fight against the diseases that produced textbook examples were much less rigid. Poliomyelitis was known long before anyone had a way of imaging a tiny virus. It failed many of the existing tests for infectious disease, causing Koch to revise his postulates. The Rous sarcoma virus was found long before anyone knew about retroviruses, or DNA for that matter, and the cause of any cancer was a complete mystery. Even after DNA was discovered, the "central dogma" of molecular biology was that information flowed from DNA to RNA, not the reverse. This is an important exception. I have lived long enough to remember polio epidemics. I don't have to go far back in memory to turn up statements that "cancer is not contagious". I now hear doctors say that cervical cancer can be completely prevented by vaccinating for HPV. "What about prostate cancer?", I ask.
Almost any prediction of a highly specific course of pathology is likely to be falsified in our current state of ignorance. One tactic of the deniers is to provoke people into committing themselves to such a prediction, by saying hypotheses are too vague to be tested, then demolish that, along with their reputation. We still hear that DeFreitas claimed to have found HTLV-2, and that tests showed this was not present. If you read her published work in detail, you will find she said the virus she found was not HTLV 1 or 2, merely that it shared some characteristics and sequence similarity. She actually tested for them. She isolated virus, but she never finished characterizing it. No one else was willing to take up her work.
And try not to focus on what may come... sad as that sounds.
