Thanks for posting these. The second link is especially interesting to me. I don't want to have a "mild" Covid infection, much less a serious one. I'm elderly and have underlying conditions and my goal is to avoid Covid entirely, if possible.
As the author writes about his illness:
In my case, it was worse than expected, but in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen. [He also noted in the article that he felt "low" for weeks after his illness.]
This mild category is essentially a catchall, says
Dr. Robert Wachter, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "Mild" can be "a day of feeling crummy to being completely laid up in bed for a week, all of your bones hurt and your brain isn't working well."
"So even if we call them mild cases, as you've seen, sometimes these are ones you really don't want to have if you can avoid it," he says.