Don't know for sure whether I have had COVID, but back in late Dec 2019 I had a nasty illness which if I'd had it a couple of months later would have been diagnosed as COVID. I had been mixing in an industry group who'd been working with some people from the correct region of China, so possible.
Extreme fatigue, dry cough, overnight fever like nothing else since I had (bad) measles as a child. Note- I have had "proper flu" in the intervening years and the fever was nothing like this.
(I get fever dreams whenever I have a fever, level of total bizarreness/scariness directly related to level of fever).
The thing was, it started as a bad cold kind of, then went away then came back with a vengence and the fever. There was a point where I was struggling to walk, felt winded- no wheezing though, just couldn't get enough O2 in, had to walk VERY SLOWLY and an easy 10-min walk was a 20 min struggle.
After effects- tired, persistent cough/tight chest lasted several months, allergies flared. Some days better than others. In fact it's been best part of a year before I felt myself again. Antihistamines helped muchly. In the early days I woke up in the night a couple of times gasping for air. Never happened before, extremely scary. For some months could only sleep if lying on my left side/front.
A few of us at the same industry event had a similar thing- we all had a really rotten Christmas.
Was it COVID? Probably, but I'm still being careful in case it wasn't.
GC