22-Year-Old With Coronavirus Shares How Terribly It Affected Her Despite Living A Healthy Lifestyle

If you think you’re invincible just because you’re young and healthy, don’t be so sure. A 22-year-old university student shared her experience about what it’s like to come down with the coronavirus.

“You do not want to catch this,” Amy Shircel puts it plain and simple before going into detail about what she felt like and what her symptoms were day by day. Amy’s Twitter thread reached a lot of people, with more than 292.9k likes and 114k retweets at the time of writing.

She warned young people in their 20s to be careful. Especially considering that she was very ill despite living a healthy lifestyle, having no underlying conditions, and exercising every day. Scroll down for Bored Panda's interview with Amy.

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Amy, who lives and studies in Wisconsin, developed a cough, then a fever, lost her energy, started vomiting, was out of breath from moving just a tiny bit. She had to go to the emergency room twice!

Her very first symptoms started showing on March 15, some time after she came back from her trip to Europe. Four days later, her test results came back: she had Covid-19. ABC News confirmed that Amy had the coronavirus after she provided them with her test results.

Amy said she found it frustrating that some of her friends and followers aren’t staying at home which helps slow down the spread of the virus. “The importance of quarantine and actually being quarantined and not just having your boyfriend over. That's not what it means to be in quarantine. It's important to not be selfish and be greedy. Just be patient,” she added.

Though Amy’s feeling weaker than usual, she now has her energy and appetite back. “Honestly, for a while, I forgot what it's like to feel healthy, so it's been really nice."

Amy told Bored Panda that she is now 1 week symptom-free and feeling "so much better."

" I still do not have all of my strength and energy back due to being sick and not eating for so long, but I am getting there! I can just tell that I am not back to 100% health yet, and it will probably be a while before I do feel 100%."

According to Amy, for the first 12 days that she was sick, she was all alone at her apartment in Madison. "My roommates both were in quarantine at their parents' houses. I had to stay away from my family because my mom recently had surgery on her heart, and we didn't want to take any chances, even before I was sick."

"On the 12th day, I felt I couldn't take care of myself anymore, and I was too sick to be alone, so my dad picked me up and brought me to my home in Kenosha. My mom and sister had to temporarily move to the neighbors' house, and my dad was the only one at home with me. Right now, my dad is showing no symptoms. He took everything very seriously and was very careful when having me home. Everyone else in my family is also healthy," she said.

Amy doesn't know why she got so ill from the virus. "I think it is so variable as to who gets what symptoms, and how severe they are. I have read about healthy people my age dying from the illness, and people my age having symptoms that are extremely mild. You also hear about elderly people recovering."

"Basically, I have no idea why I was affected so severely. I consider myself in great health, I exercise(d) every day, I eat healthily, I am a competitive runner and competitive swimmer. I do not have any underlying health conditions, and I have never smoked or vaped. Because of this, I think it is important to note that the coronavirus does not discriminate. It does not care how young, healthy, or fit you are, if you are infected, it will run its course accordingly. This is why it is so important for everybody to take this pandemic so seriously. People are dying, people are sick, and as healthy people, we need to not be selfish and stay home. It is not that hard."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that the people most at-risk from the coronavirus are over the age of 65 and those who have underlying medical conditions. But that doesn’t mean that anyone who’s young and healthy can’t get sick. Some might get lucky and won’t show any symptoms while others can end up just like Amy—exhausted and fearing for their lives.

There are now more than a million cases of people infected with Covid-19 around the world. The US now reports over 245k cases and more than 6k people have died from the disease.