Hypothesis: Could COVID-19 Provoke a Flare-Up of Epstein Barr Virus?
re: Personal Health: Cyclical Extreme Fatigue Explained: Diagnosis of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Epstein Barr Virus
re: Dealing with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Epstein Barr Virus (EBV): a Few Things that Have Helped
I was diagnosed with Epstein Barr Virus and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in early September 2020.
Although I tested negative for COVID-19 antibodies in early September, that was 4.5 months after my 2.5 week mid-April episode that was consistent with CV19 symtoms. So I had written of the April episode as “unknown pathogen”.
However, since then, a physician friend of mine has told me that antibody tests that far out are sketchy. Thus a negative test might not mean much. Furthermore, a physician friend of his is suffering from Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) for months, just like I have been suffering (and still do)—it has been a long haul and I still only have a fraction of my strength. This is too strikingly similar.
Epstein Barr virus is known to hide-out in the body permanently, flaring up opportunistically. Moreover, it is my own life experience that a virus can flip genetic switches—in my case a lifetime of no allergies or asthma turned into a 10-year ordeal to get both under control, following a severe pulmonary viral infection at age 20 (all my allergists have confirmed this as a real thing).
So what I am getting at is the possibility that this ongoing fatigue (similar to mononucleosis, though my WBC count is normal) might in fact be EBV or some genetic switch-flipping thing. So it might take a loooooong time to recover from.
Hypothesis
Yeah, I know all this is “anecdotal” as physicians like to say, and I am well aware of confirmation bias, but I am not making a conclusion, only a working hypothesis:
Might a COVID-19 infection trigger the flare-up of other latent viral problems such as Epstein Barr Virus? And/or other viruses (perhaps varicella zoster eg Shingles)?
I hope to speak directly to this other physician with EBV, so we can compare notes. Of course, whatever I had might have been some other virus, so the hypothesis is a general one.