Honey, hot water and headache pills. Plus a bit of singing and dancing. Those are some of the ways that people who’ve had coronavirus found helped them recover.
You’ve heard, of course, about this new bug, a kind of flu, that has gone around the world. Over a hundred thousand people have got sick – though for every single person who’s been ill, seventy thousand other people haven’t. In other words, it’s still very rare. And nearly everyone who gets it has been getting better.
Many say they hardly noticed being ill. Others said that it passed in a few days.
A lady called Julie in Singapore told the BBC that she felt she had a cold and took some headache pills. Some days later though, she woke up feeling dizzy.
At the hospital, they put her in “isolation” – a room on her own, to avoid spreading the disease.
The virus, which we also call COVID-19, spreads when we touch something where a sick person has coughed or sneezed.
Julie said she used her phone but she hated not being near other people:
“I wanted to go knock on the wall and just talk to the other person next door” she said.
Now that she is totally fine, Julie said she spoke on television because she wanted other people not to be afraid – and to be kind to people who get sick.
Pavel Senou is 21 and comes from West Africa. He is a student in China and caught the coronavirus there. He told a journalist from Cameroon, his home country, that he was a little scared when he first had to go to hospital.
But, he added: “I stayed very positive. I told myself that I would be the happiest sick person anyone had ever seen. So I sang and danced in the hospital.”
The nurses worked so hard that he felt sorry for them.
“The doctor told me that being young and playing sports like football and basketball would help me get over the illness” he said.
Now he’s much better, Pavel says: “Everyone needs to do their bit.” That means doing things like washing our hands, to that the virus can’t spread.
Connor Reed, who is 25 and comes from Wales, also lives in China. For a week, he thought he had a cold and kept going to work. When he got worse, he went to hospital, had some tests. But then he went home to look after himself.
He remembered how, when he was little, his mum would put honey in hot water for him when he was poorly. Drinking that, he found, also helped with COVID-19.
Connor’s fine now and he’s even pleased. Why? “I can’t catch it again” he told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. “I’m immune now.”
Our bodies are brilliant at fighting and once they’ve beaten a bug once, it doesn’t bother us again.
It’s natural to feel a bit worried, even if very, very few children get this bug. You should talk about it to your parents or teachers.
They can tell you what we are doing to stop the virus, including about scientists who are developing vaccines against it.
We may need to change some habits, some plans. But we may also find things to like about not going out so much – or about feeling that we are all part of a big global, human family, facing a challenge together, wherever we live.
And let’s be inspired by Pavel from Cameroon. If we feel low, why not try singing and doing a little dance. It works for us here at WoW!
