I've got a few contacts in hospitals in Paris from back when I lived there with my ex-wife and she was a nurse in the biggest hospital there. They're being hit pretty hard, some of them are posting about being scared all the time and hating how they're portrayed as heroes because it means they can't say how scared and panicked they are, about being given instructions by the government to not reanimate people over a certain age and help them pass away with drugs, etc. One of them (a male nurse) got the virus early on, and went to ER but he wasn't considered a priority because he's still in his late 30s so he had to go home and use an asthma inhaler when he had some trouble breathing (he doesn't have asthma, that's what the hospital gave him to use if it got bad) -- he reported the worse muscle pain he had in his life for a few days. The refrigerated trucks outside some of the hospitals to hold bodies temporarily is true in some of the most heavily affected areas.
I don't directly know anyone who's confirmed to have gotten it besides 2 nurses (1 in Paris, 1 in Brussels), but my ex-wife knows a couple families that were affected not too severely but did report similar things as Izuno and others -- to them it manifested as a super strong flu that's kind of unpredictable (fine one minute, completely fucked the next, with some getting better then worse again)
My hometown is fairly small for a city, and out of the ways, so we've not yet been too badly hit as far as I know and some patients from Paris got transferred here (since most trains do not run anymore, some got converted into moving clinics to transfer patients around to other hospitals). Still not taking chances to contract it and be responsible for deaths in or out of my loved ones, so I've only gone out twice in the last 3 weeks to get groceries for myself and my ex-wife/kids and take the trash out. My grand-ma is a 87 years-old cancer survivor and just sold her house to soon relocate with my mom here, and now she's freaking out and no longer leaving her packed-up home at all, living off of her poultry and garden as much as she can, so we had to organize for people from her area to drop off groceries at her gate. My girlfriend recently went through a major rebound from being given steroids to treat nerve pain (she has acute spondylolisthesis), which essentially fucked up her whole nervous system and led to lots of physical therapy and dry needling to try to get it back up, so there's no telling how she would react to the virus -- she moved out of L.A. a couple of weeks back to be in a less populated area in the californian desert at her mom's so hopefully we won't have to find out. My daughter gets epilepsy strokes when her fever gets too high and has to be taken to the ER, so I also hope she stays clear of it.
Bleh, it's in times like this that you realize how fragile both our bodies and our societal systems are. I'm glad we're generally prioritizing people over economy in a time like this though, and hope that some of those intentions remain afterwards and keep some of the laws/systems under scrutiny for a while after -- if some laws could be lifted or softened, or if money could be found to support the crisis, it should allow those laws to be reviewed and some seemingly-impossible-to-solve-because-too-expensive budget problems to be exposed as possible but just not deemed important by the people making the calls. I feel like we're going to feel the effects of this virus for many years to come in trauma, society, economy, etc.
