Following on from a members account yesterday regarding contracting Covid-19. Friends of theirs have also kindly given their own detailed account of how it affected them both.

Please again take the time to read this in full. It could happen to you.

Myself and my wife are 2 friends of the previous author and we also tested positive around the same time after having been informed that we had been in contact with a person that had tested positive.

The only symptoms I had was that of a slight cold but did loose my sense of small. My wife on the other hand was in bed for 8 days awful diarrhea, feeling sick all the time, head aches and hot then cold she lost 10 pounds in a week. Her symptoms started about 4 days after contact and knocked her for 6 the onset was very quick, thankfully I was ok to look after her. After 8 days in bed she had enough strength to get out of bed and eat a slice of toast for breakfast then back to bed for a few hours. Up again at lunchtime for a scrambled egg then back to bed for the rest of the day. 

After a few days of being up for a couple of hours at a time she has now got to the stage of being up for most of the day and slowly starting to eat properly again. She is now recovering slowly but is still breathless when walking around it has taken her just over 2 weeks from onset of symptoms to be able to start recovery. This virus hit her very hard and has completely changed her life over the past weeks. 

We have private health insurance so had to pay for a private test. After we tested positive I informed Maria Louisa who passed our details onto the health centre. We have had a couple of phone calls from the health centre and the track and tracers. As a group of friends we took the decision to self isolate after the initial contact with a person who tested positive I hate to think how many other residents of Arboleas the 6 of us would have infected if we had just carried on as if nothing had happened. 

I would urge everyone who has been in contact with someone that tests positive to self isolate. 

This is an awful virus and we must all stick to the rules. Stay safe.

One of our members and his wife have recently recovered from Covid-19. He has kindly given me a very detailed report of the whole process from start to finish. I hope you find it of help to know the process. 

Please make time to read it all. It's well worth knowing.

So.... We had been socialising at the Azabache on the Sunday with our own bubble of friends whom we have been around for several months. For the first time ever, we sat inside as there was no option to sit outside.

Ina, the owner mentioned on the following Wednesday, on her FB page that she had tested positive.

As a responsible act we self isolated purely because we had been there.

I then started to get some symptoms. At first it was headaches, thumping headaches and aching eyeballs, yes strange I know.

So on the Thursday I felt a little like poo and called the doctor at the health centre in Arboleas (I am Autonimo and so we are both on the health system).

I advised reception that I had symptoms, my wife too and we had been in the vicinity of someone else who tested positive. The reception spoke with the doctor and we were prescribed a test at the old sports centre in Albox for the Thursday.

We went and had the test, remaining seated in the car, they took our health cards, recorded our info from them, then returned them to us.

They came to the car, spoke English and explained the procedure. This involved placing a long thin stick with what looked similar to a cotton bud on the end, into the nose cavity and all the way back.  They repeated this on both sides. It did not hurt but made my eyes water, although my wife was perfectly comfortable with it.

They said that if we heard nothing in 1 hour then we were negative.

We heard nothing for the rest of the day, but out of sense we decided to remain in isolation just in case. Then on Sunday Maria contacted me on FB asking me to call her ASAP.

I did, and I was told the doctor had been trying to contact me since Thursday and in fact we were positive.

There is obviously no contingency plan in respect of when you cannot contact the patient due to poor phone signal, as in our case!!

Maria was VERY helpful and told us we needed to isolate from 10 days from the test date (Thursday), she offered help if we needed shopping and also told us we must not only isolate but also NOT go to the rubbish bins. All refuse was to be tripple bagged and placed in the red bin by the health centre AFTER our quarantine period.

We were called later that night by the Spanish track and trace team, there was a language barrier as my Spanish is not yet colloquial  So they phoned back and we had a 3 line conversation using an interpreter that they arranged.

They asked all the questions like did I work, if so where and would have wanted colleagues details. The fact I was Autonimo and not worked a week before the test meant they didn't ask for details of clients.

They spoke to me first then my wife who had been to Slimwell Spain two days before the test, they wanted  to know who she was sat with and who she associated with on her table. They recorded all their details and contacted them seperately.

We were called 3 times by the medical centre asking how we were, checking our symptoms etc.  The final call was from Dr Ramos on Tuesday who went through the same questions and confirmed we had no symptoms. He then said we could 'return to normal life'.

In terms of the Covid. I felt like I had been hit by a bus for one day.  My temp went up to 38.7 for less than a day.  My symptoms came seperately and not all at once and I had:

• Sore throat
• Aching eyes
• Headache
• Feeling cold 
• General feeling of tired
• Diarrhea
• Slight cough, only slight, with a feeling of coughing up broken glass.

These symptoms were all over maximum 3 days and not all at once.

I would say I was ILL for 2 days.

My wife was better than me and had:

• feeling like a cold
• Sneezing
• Feeling cold 
• aching joints
• headaches
• diarrhea
• Sore back

Hope this helps in some way?

Any questions please just ask.

By the way, that was our experience. We have friends (in our bubble who were hit a lot worse in terms of suffering) and their experience of track and trace and phone calls were slightly different to ours.

Interestingly one couple, although on private health care, paid for their tests at Huercal Overa, however once tested positive they were called and monitored by the health centre.

From Juani Martinez, Cultural Councillor of Arboleas Ayuntamiento

We continue adding in the tourist authorization of the Espejuelo mine. Conditioning and improvement of visitor access.