[HN Gopher] NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 in...
___________________________________________________________________
NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in
U.S.
Author : infodocket
Score : 109 points
Date : 2021-06-15 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nih.gov)
| splithalf wrote:
| I thought I had covid before news of covid even came out. Was
| googling "novel pneumonia type illnesses" and reading about
| sequelae. I had had close contact with wuhan travelers in late
| dec. 2020. Mostly fatigue and headache for a week, then the lung
| issues started and lasted a month or more. A few weeks later the
| first couple of California cases from China presented at a local
| er. Few cared at that point as the politics were inverted early
| on due to the travel ban, and also the super bowl and impeachment
| vying for the public's attention.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| There are thousands of travelers flying from China to the US
| every single day. It seems obvious that the earliest infections
| would be sooner than January 2020. I remain unsurprised by these
| new findings, because past conversations around this topic would
| always be shut down or dismissed, leading to no serious, balanced
| conversation. Common sense and reasonable speculation were met
| with vitriol and people tried to claim a moral high road of
| "trusting the science". Just like with the lab leak theory not
| actually being "debunked", this too is further evidence of how
| echo chambers, politics, and groupthink have corrupted discourse.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I, too, had a very bad cold in December 2019 and January 2020.
| With a lot of exhausting dry cough and no unusual bacteria
| cultivated from samples. Five weeks of utter misery.
|
| But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt
| completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe
| back then must have been something else.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I think it is fairly obvious that this virus could have
| circulated considerably earlier than the first confirmed cases in
| Wuhan mid November 2020, given its nature of asymptomic spread
| and form of disease which easily could be mistaken for something
| else.
|
| The work with blood sample analysis should be done all over the
| planet and its range should be broadened to samples earlier than
| January 2020.
| mmmrtl wrote:
| You can estimate the date of the outbreak's origin with
| phylodynamics, using the diversity of circulating SARS-CoV-2
| and its mutation rate to estimate the time to most recent
| common ancestor (TMRCA) as 27.11.2019 [CI 07.11.2019 -
| 11.12.2019]. "Considerably earlier" doesn't fit the evidence
|
| https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiologi...
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It could have been spreading somewhere else, undetected or
| mistaken for something else.
| qwerty1234599 wrote:
| It's possible that a mutation emerged in november 2019 that
| pushed the R number up. A "mild" form of the virus could very
| easily have lingered in China/SEA for years.
| floxy wrote:
| >given its nature of asymptomatic spread
|
| Does anyone have a pointer to the latest information on
| asymptomatic spread? This is the latest thing I've found, and
| it doesn't seem to think asymptomatic spreading is likely.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
| mrfusion wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| This is the big study, a city wide screening in Wuhan found
| not a single documented case:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
|
| And beyond that this is a meta-analysis of 54 studies showing
| near 0 presymptomatic/asymptomatic rate:
|
| https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-
| researche...
| grawprog wrote:
| I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my
| boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted
| about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that
| sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and
| pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really
| bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really
| a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was
| hard to clear the congestion.
|
| It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us
| were sick for pretty much the same length of time.
|
| It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get
| fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just
| like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably
| until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again.
|
| We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had
| covid, but never really took it seriously.
| rhino369 wrote:
| The chances are really low that it was covid. A lot of colds go
| around and many last a long time. Millions of Americans had a
| cold in December 2019. A handful likely had COVID-19. You are
| probably in the former camp.
| grawprog wrote:
| I agree, that's why I've never really considered it was
| covid. It was just coincidental timing and strange symptoms.
| It wouldn't be my first 'weird cold'. I haven't even really
| thought about it much until I seen the comment thread here.
| Seeing other people's stories reminded me of it. It was just
| more of an anecdote to add than anything.
| AmVess wrote:
| There was a nasty flu going around that winter. I got it in
| October/November and it very nearly hospitalized me. I was
| down for two solid weeks.
|
| It was too early for C19, but it was brutal nonetheless.
| babyshake wrote:
| I got a bad flu in early December 2019. Fever, vomiting,
| cramping. It does indeed seem like colds and flus have
| gotten considerably more nasty in the last decade.
| asdff wrote:
| You are also a decade older with a less robust immune
| system. That's why these statements are hard to qualify,
| too many latent variables.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, my son got pneumonia in late 2019. Tested negative
| for previous COVID exposure over the summer of 2020; we
| certainly wondered prior to that.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > There was a nasty flu going around that winter.
|
| Yes, it was a bad flu season, with possibly more than one
| of the bad cold or flu in the winter of 2019-2020. I was
| ill 3 times in the last 3 months of 2019. On the last one I
| went to a doctor who basically said "there's a lot of it
| about".
|
| Also, the last cold that I had, was in February 2020.
| rhino369 wrote:
| My sister got it and had to skip Christmas. Tested positive
| for influenza.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Sounds like a weird cold. There just wasn't very much COVID
| around back then.
| testplzignore wrote:
| Some of the schools around me closed for a day in late January
| 2020 to clean due to an influenza outbreak. I thought it was
| strange at the time since there was no evident increase in
| illness among adults I know. I figure it was a bad strain that
| had been lying dormant for a while, so kids had no immunity to
| it. It was very specifically stated at the time to be
| influenza, as opposed to just higher-than-normal absences due
| to non-specific diseases. I think the absence rate was
| something like 30%.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Did you have side effects after your first covid vaccine?
| Apparently that's more likely if you've already had covid.
|
| https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25066791...
| foobarian wrote:
| I had almost the exact same experience in late Jan [edit:
| 2020], along with most of my coworkers. I did keep wondering if
| I had Covid so I got tested, but with a negative result. The
| main piece of evidence that speaks against the Covid theory is
| any kind of mortality deviation, which didn't occur until later
| half of March.
|
| Anecdotally, over time I heard many other locales, workspaces
| and schools experienced a similar "weird cold." It may not have
| been Covid but there was certainly a very widespread, and very
| unusual cold in the winter of 2019-2020.
| ssully wrote:
| You had the same experience in late Jan of 2020 or 2021?
| foobarian wrote:
| Edited-in the year, apologies. It was Jan 2020.
| ssully wrote:
| Ahh thank you! I am guessing you are outside of the USA.
| Our testing pipeline was basically a shit show until the
| end of March 2020 [1]. The first CDC kits (The only tests
| authorized) didn't start shipping out until the start of
| Feb, and they were later determined to be faulty!
|
| [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/0
| 4/18/tim...
| foobarian wrote:
| No, not at all - I am in MA. Note I did not get tested
| immediately, I merely wondered about those winter colds
| so many of us experienced until the testing became more
| available. Then around June I got an antibody test at an
| urgent care clinic to put the question to rest.
|
| Mind you the test could have still been faulty, but the
| mortality data ultimately does not show any anomalies in
| that time frame and that's a lot harder to explain under
| the hypothesis that it was C19.
| sneak wrote:
| I've heard stories like this from a lot of people in
| Dec/Jan/Feb. Many of them carried on in the months that
| followed as if they were already in possession of antibodies,
| believing that they "already had covid".
|
| As others have pointed out, there are lots of cold-and-flu
| style illnesses endemic in the human population. There are
| antibody tests that can tell you reasonably authoritatively, if
| you're actually curious.
| simonh wrote:
| There are many, many different viruses that cause 'the flu' and
| the symptoms can vary quite a bit between varieties.
| cmbuck wrote:
| Have any of you get tested for antibodies?
| grawprog wrote:
| I never did, i don't think any of us did. One of us ended up
| in close proximity however to someone who'd tested positive
| for covid, just prior to getting the results of their tests.
| This person did not get sick.
|
| That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's
| impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing
| should be made of it unless that person were to ever be
| tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still
| can't draw any conclusions from it.
|
| Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020,
| just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not
| because I thought I already had it, but mostly because
| there's no point in worrying about something I can't change.
| If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to
| avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then
| there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened.
|
| I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having
| been following the rules fairly stringently would
| unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where
| I could be exposed for no real reason.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I wish I had it on hand, but I have seen it more than once,
| including not long after it came out: in October 2019, one of the
| 4chan folks, one of the lab geeks, posted that they had seen a
| fairly unusual virus come trucking through in the SARS family. I
| saw the screenshot posted again around December.
|
| I would not be even a little shocked if it were kicking around in
| early 2019, or even before. Just think of how HIV was skulking
| about, smoldering, before really catching on the tinder.
| gpcr1949 wrote:
| here's the archived 4chan post [0]. The op is sort of
| ridiculous and not relevant, but the poster with id pUlkHE7L
| post some PCR stuff which is very strange to post at that date
| (21 october 2019 if the timestamps are correct). However, SARS-
| CoV-2 is 30kb not 35kb.
|
| [0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/
| mattzito wrote:
| Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february,
| early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid
| tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do
| but hunker down and wait.
|
| We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became
| widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had
| antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests
| over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't
| had covid. All negative.
|
| So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty
| upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at
| least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed
| we were not.
| p_j_w wrote:
| There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment
| section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had
| caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the
| people involved took a rational/science minded approach and
| bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be
| viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for
| others.
|
| >So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug?
|
| I think we in the general public have a tendency to
| underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of
| people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of
| easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.
| Fomite wrote:
| This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease
| epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza.
| As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and
| both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.
| bsder wrote:
| > I think we in the general public have a tendency to
| underestimate just how bad the flu is.
|
| Holy hell this.
|
| I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like
| a bad flu."
|
| I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out
| of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind.
|
| Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get
| infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would
| teach them.
| jeherr wrote:
| I had a coworker who got really sick around the same time. He
| had the PCR test done and it came back negative. There was
| definitely a bad flu going around at the same time as covid was
| popping up in the US.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I could see that. I got absolutely wrecked around the end of
| February, in part because I got badly chilled one night and
| allowed it to persist (not wanting to go make a fire in the
| woodstove when it was already nighttime). I ran a high fever
| for days and was totally wiped out, and have always wondered
| if it was COVID.
|
| Ended up just getting vaccinated, now I'll never know. For
| what it's worth, the second Moderna dose clobbered me like it
| was supposed to, so maybe it was busy making antibodies and I
| didn't actually get any immunity from February 2020...
| fl0wenol wrote:
| Same happened to me, was in public a lot that February, got a
| terrible flu that laid me up. Got tested twice (two different
| antibodies tests) a few months later and both negative.
|
| Just a bad coincidence but I suppose I could count myself
| lucky.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Its interesting to me how so many people got a flu during flu
| season but they all are convinced they had covid. Good for you
| for at least getting an antibody test.
| jp42 wrote:
| Exactly same experience for me. precisely in late feb, early
| march. I could have written this comment without change a word.
| npunt wrote:
| This was my experience as well. In SF and got symptoms mid Feb,
| doctor visit two weeks later concluded pneumonia and gave me
| antibiotics, no covid tests available, took 2+ months to
| recover. Later got Abbott Architect antibody test and it was
| negative, but I'm skeptical of the result.
| tomrod wrote:
| What is Abbott's false negative rate again? Im remembering
| initially it was sort of high, but I don't recall offhand.
| lioeters wrote:
| > Dr. Francis Collins, director for the National Institutes
| of Health (NIH), said the Abbott ID Now machine, which is
| used to perform rapid coronavirus tests, has "about a 15%
| false negative rate."
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/us-coronavirus-
| update-0... (May 2020)
|
| EDIT: The above is just one of the search results I found.
| There may be more recent (and more accurate) data.
| kderbyma wrote:
| why is all this 'new information' the same information that was
| around last year?....like it's all about a year old.....I was
| reading articles about this last year in June...
| feral wrote:
| So many people, even here, read the article and are like "I knew
| I had covid that December, I had the weirdest cold".
|
| But actually this should make you suspicious of such anecdotes.
|
| There's just much too many of them for them all to be covid.
|
| So they really count as evidence that people just get weird colds
| and flus.
|
| And hence that the weird cold you had in November 2019 was just a
| weird non-covid cold.
| lambda wrote:
| Yeah. My problem is that my "really bad cold that lingered" was
| in February 2020.
|
| That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that
| time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say.
|
| I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been
| struggling more with concentration issues and depression since
| then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over
| losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation
| in the US, etc.
|
| The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response
| has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and
| doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to
| China.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| The CDC's Dr. Thornburg and Josh Denny, chief executive of the
| NIH's All of Us program and an author of the latest study, both
| said they don't plan to search blood samples earlier than
| December 2019, given how few they have found back then. "We've
| seen a very low rate of positivity in this time period," [1]
|
| [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-
| illi...
|
| Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID
| originated.
| xienze wrote:
| > Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID
| originated.
|
| Because if people found out that Covid had been spreading in
| the US for months before the "official" starting date of
| March 2020, they'd come to realize that they would have never
| even realized there was a pandemic going on were it not for
| the media attention.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I was pretty sure I had COVID in November '20. Everyone else in
| my household had it, and we didn't isolate from each other
| really stringently. I had a mild sore throat for a couple of
| days. Never got tested because I was "quarantined" anyway for
| the close contacts.
|
| Finally I went and got a COVID antibody test to satisfy my
| curiosity, which was negative on all factors.
|
| I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20,
| but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation
| if I was infected. Seems to me it would not, but that's not
| based on any really informed judgment.
| driverdan wrote:
| > I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March
| '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody
| formation if I was infected.
|
| First, there's no scientific basis for doing so. Unless your
| diet is deficient of zinc or you're spending months in an
| overcast winter environment neither is going to do anything
| for you. They certainly won't have any impact on antibody
| formation.
| dhzizns wrote:
| " there's no scientific basis"
|
| Theres no scientific basis for anything until a proper
| study is done. Doesn't mean it isn't true. And consider
| that estimates are as high as 50% of scientific papers'
| results are false (especially in bio).
|
| N.B.1: I'm a scientist in a government lab
|
| N.B. 2: I'm not impugning science, just fellow scientists.
| passivate wrote:
| > And consider that estimates are as high as 50% of
| scientific papers' results are false (especially in bio).
|
| Source?
| teknopaul wrote:
| I have seen scientific evidence that Vit D supplimenting
| helps. In Spain its prescribed if you get covid. re:
| "unless you are deficient": you supliment to ensure you
| arent deficient, you are foolish to risk zinc or Vit D
| deficiency if you know you have covid. If you plan a fews
| days in bed you are (usually) not going to get much sun.
| It's foolish to risk deficiency of any vitamin while ill.
| andruby wrote:
| 42% of the US population has a vitamin D deficiency [0]. In
| the HN population, that number might even be higher
| (extrapolating my experience with tech workers and the
| hours they spend outside).
|
| I would encourage most people here to have their Vitamin D
| levels checked and take supplements, especially in the
| winter months.
|
| [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Most doctors I've met agreed with this.
|
| Also certain diets could have other deficiencies, like in
| my case I almost never eat fish so I add omega3 (DHA).
| astrange wrote:
| > First, there's no scientific basis for doing so.
|
| "No scientific basis" doesn't necessarily mean "false",
| otherwise you create a world where everything not mandatory
| is forbidden. Many doctors do exist in this world; they're
| always totally confident even when they're wrong, and they
| will tell you to not do things unless it's the specific
| thing they want you to do.
| nradov wrote:
| There is some limited _in vitro_ evidence for zinc as a
| treatment.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/
| j...
|
| The evidence for vitamin D is much stronger including
| multiple randomized controlled trials.
|
| https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/
| asdff wrote:
| People still have antibodies from 2003 SARS infections, I
| don't think you've had COVID.
| the-rc wrote:
| I was in a study. My IgG titer went up to 960, when I gave
| plasma twice, then 7-8 months after the infection it was
| below the 80 threshold to be considered positive. The weird
| thing was that six months in, I got tested for IgM and I
| was positive for that as well, which might been a sign of a
| second exposure. I know others in the same study who were
| negative a few weeks after being positive. So it might
| depend on the person and the test.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| antibody tests are really hard. his could be a false
| negative. further, he could have had it, but without
| antibodies. or he might have had something else.
| passivate wrote:
| >antibody tests are really hard.
|
| Are you referring to the quantitative side? You can
| simply buy the antibody standard and sVNT test kit from
| Genscript. You can get a 96 test kit for under $3k. We
| have it and it works quite well.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| the general concept of antibody tests. Antibodies have
| serious dilution. Detection is a challenging problem.
| Many antibody tests (ex. measles) has a pretty high (in
| my unqualified opinion) false negative rate. Its a tough
| problem to solve in general.
|
| a single paper discussing false reports -
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14574997/
| renewiltord wrote:
| If he didn't have antibodies then how did he ever
| recover? Surely the thing doesn't just burn itself out.
| Without anything to fight it, won't it just continually
| infect him?
| abfan1127 wrote:
| some people are recovering through other responses,
| including t-cell response, etc. I don't have the academic
| experience, the clinic experience, or his specific
| medical history, so I can't speak specifically. I do
| recall lots of papers at the beginning of Covid talking
| about high t-cell responses in patients without a
| lingering anti-body response. That all could have been
| early science based on poor data as well though.
| peter422 wrote:
| Based on the information provided it seems highly
| unlikely the OP had covid.
|
| It isn't impossible but the lack of antibodies is just
| one further data point. Most people who recover have
| positive antibody tests.
| nradov wrote:
| There are two basic immune systems: innate and adaptive.
| In some cases the innate immune system clears the
| infection before the adaptive immune system produces
| detectible levels of antibodies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system?wprov=
| sfl...
| simonh wrote:
| I think it's unlikely that's it for someone seriously ill
| for an extended period.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sorry, I'm aware of that in general. I was wondering in
| this case. I suppose that's possible for people who don't
| fall sick (I assume that's why low viral load means you
| can get exposed and not get sick?) but OP was quite sick.
| nradov wrote:
| The antibody tests do occasionally come up negative for
| patients who had confirmed infections. You might want to get
| the Adaptive Biotechnologies T-Detect COVID test which assays
| memory T cells.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-
| announcements/coronavi...
| ssully wrote:
| I just think most people haven't actually had a bad case of the
| flu or a respiratory illness before. So people who did around
| November/December assume it must have been covid, when they
| most likely just caught something that people usually catch
| around that time of year.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they
| were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a
| week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my
| family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and
| coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it
| feels like to be very ill.
|
| If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by
| covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal.
| That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think
| they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at
| all.
| didibus wrote:
| It took 31 years before I ever caught the real flu
| (influenza), and not just a cold or stomach flu. And most
| people in my family or my friends have never had it.
| lottin wrote:
| Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39
| years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year,
| but the flu only once in my entire life.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Flu is kinda like COVID: a significant percentage of
| infections are without symptoms.
|
| Lots of estimates, I usually see it as around one-third
| of cases having no symptoms:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646474/
|
| I'll take a slight leap and guesstimate this means a lot
| of flu infections are around the symptom level of a mild
| or bad cold as well.
|
| When you know you have the flu, it's probably the flu,
| but it's much harder to self-determine that you don't
| have the flu.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| Influenza is rare? Maybe rare _for you_ if you habitually
| get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy
| of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very
| common, most people have experienced it.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| > That's why you have people who are dying of covid but
| think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't
| real at all.
|
| Yeah, this is 100 percent not the reason people think covid
| isn't real.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| There are a myriad of reasons why people think covid
| isn't real. But for the segment of that population who
| think it isn't real _when they are dying of it_ , the
| _perceived_ severity of their experienced symptoms is a
| big part of it.
| dhzizns wrote:
| Im in my late 30s and I have never had the flu. Ive had
| multiple terrible colds, but no flu.
|
| The flus not hard to avoid, and might have gone extinct
| with the lockdowns
|
| EDIT: i dont take the flu vaccine
| wearywanderer wrote:
| > _[Influenza] might have gone extinct with the
| lockdowns_
|
| I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _Ive had multiple terrible colds, but no flu._
|
| How do you tell the difference between a terrible cold
| and flu? Doctors can't tell the difference from symptoms
| alone, do you have yourself tested each time you have a
| cold?
|
| _might have gone extinct with the lockdowns_
|
| That's not likely, and with fewer people exposed to the
| flu and gaining natural immunity, there may even be a big
| spike in flu cases if social distancing and mask wearing
| are relaxed next flu season.
| didibus wrote:
| I guess that's a good point, but I think of the flu as
| different symptoms, you are really fatigued, you have
| brain fog, feel a bit like you are at the brink of death,
| have headaches, and you're caughing, maybe with a sore
| throat and more difficulty breathing.
|
| Whereas colds are more congestion with drowsiness.
|
| But you're totally right, symptoms alone are hard to use
| for accurately knowing what you had, there are so many
| types of cold virus and bacteria out there too.
|
| I guess for me, I had never had the symptoms I describe
| in the former, until a few years ago I did, which I
| thought of as getting the flu. Had it been early 2020, I
| might have wondered if it was Covid, given the
| description of symptoms.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > might have gone extinct with the lockdowns
|
| This is unlikely as humans aren't the only hosts for
| influenza. Almost all can infect birds and most can
| infect pigs. Probably some other humans too. And jump
| between eachother and humans.
|
| We might have the same issue with COVID: vaccinating all
| humans may not eradicate it if some animals serve as
| natural reservoirs (mink maybe? Ferrets?).
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| A colleague and his wife became 'sicker than we've ever been'
| in late December, 2019, within a week of him transiting in the
| business lounge in Vancouver airport, on his way to San Jose.
| He notes that a passenger flight from Wuhan landed in Vancouver
| at the same time and transit passengers from that flight
| enjoyed the same buffet.
|
| His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their
| grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.
| lamontcg wrote:
| "Sicker than you've ever been" isn't a medical diagnosis.
|
| I got absolutely royally fucked up by influenza and "sicker
| than I've ever been in my adult life" -- and I'm 49 -- but it
| was Jan 2019 not Dec 2019, so I'm pretty certain it wasn't
| COVID.
|
| Probably 5% of the population every winter gets "sicker than
| they've ever been in their adult life" with some horrible
| influenza/bronchitis/pneumonia.
|
| If everyone who got "sicker than they've ever been" in Dec
| 2019 were actually sick with COVID then January would have
| decimated long term care facilities around the United States.
| Instead you can't see any upward trend in excess mortality in
| Jan. If anything Jan and Feb were slightly low and the trend
| doesn't become apparent until late March.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass
| outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in
| hospitalizations?
|
| When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even
| point to other people to whom they spread their mystery
| illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more
| contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of
| their elderly relatives with it.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| While I agree with the general point you and the op are
| making, I don't think your specific assertion is correct.
| Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion;
| some people infect large numbers of other people, but most
| infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the
| people with these anecdotes didn't infect anyone they know of
| is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I
| do think you're correct that they didn't have it).
| mariodiana wrote:
| Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called
| super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I
| read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24
| thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass
| outbreak.
| Izkata wrote:
| Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that
| mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than
| common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people
| caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a
| noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these
| superspreaders.
| simonh wrote:
| This is why Italy got absolutely hammered quite early on.
| They were very unlucky to get hit by the mother of all
| super spreader events.
|
| Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France
| had a few cases before then, but it died out.
| manwe150 wrote:
| I think we more specifically know something emerged that was
| much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That
| does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier
| variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might
| provide antibodies for some. We've seen that happen multiple
| times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help
| clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin
| stories.
| Izkata wrote:
| > I think we more specifically know something emerged that
| was much more deadly and contagious around
| January/February.
|
| This is from late last year, an article that attempted to
| group the mutations into "L", "G", "S", "O", etc, strains:
| https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-
| CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yx...
|
| You can see where it compares infections to proportion of
| strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one
| or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7
| countries listed here, but I think I remember a different
| article that had more, and the pattern was pretty
| consistent.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by
| now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main
| outbreak.
| eindiran wrote:
| There have been many variants that emerged in the
| US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more
| infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the
| Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones
| that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked
| by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think
| perhaps the impression that there haven't been any
| variants stems from the fact that none of the big
| variants of concern have been from the US, which appears
| to have just been luck.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-
| varian...
| throwawaycities wrote:
| First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but
| being it was the first time in years I had been sick I
| decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for
| the anti-bodies.
|
| >why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area,
| causing a surge in hospitalizations?
|
| This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass
| delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a
| new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had
| an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically
| the news alone could be responsible for increased stress,
| much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic
| instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune
| systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data
| available regarding certain bio markers like increased
| cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the
| news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases
| before the media reporting).
|
| But let's say for example where media ( I suppose backed by
| statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than
| elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that
| youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas
| elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I was at a party during the COVID-19 crisis and felt "sicker
| than I've ever been". Got tests after I'd isolated. No
| antibodies. God damn it. Imagine getting that sick with a cold
| and then it not even giving you immunity to anything
| worthwhile.
| nradov wrote:
| Well you probably now have some level of immunity to that
| particular cold virus. So you're much less likely to have
| type of cold again. There are dozens of different viruses
| that can cause common cold symptoms.
| nend wrote:
| There's a lot of confirmation bias in this thread for sure.
|
| I thought I had COVID around February/March 2020. Roughly a
| year ago antibody tests became readily available, so I got one,
| and it came back negative. There was a strain of the flu going
| around during the winter of 2019-2020 that was not protected
| against by the flu vaccine, that I suspect is contributing to a
| lot of the confirmation bias (and I'm guessing is what I had at
| the time).
|
| I'm honestly surprised there's so many people in this thread
| who think they had COVID but never got the antibody test.
| They're cheap and quick, and if you could have confirmed you
| had COVID antibodies, at least for me that would have been a
| huge stress reliever during the last 12-18 months of pandemic
| lockdowns.
| throwkeep wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how many of those who thought
| they had it prior to Feb/March 2020 ended up getting Covid
| later, as it would mostly rule those anecdotes out.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It's kinda too late now though, since most of those people
| are vaccinated now so they'll have antibodies already, right?
| majormajor wrote:
| My understanding is that the vaccine will create antibodies
| for the spike protein (since that's been the thing the
| vaccines reproduce to train the immune system on) but not
| the nucleocapsid protein. https://www.technologynetworks.co
| m/diagnostics/blog/covid-19...
| majormajor wrote:
| I was one of those "I got something weird in late Feb 2020,
| maybe it was an early Covid case!" people, so I got an
| antibody test in April or May of last year, when they became
| easy to get. Nothing - so yeah, must've just been a weird
| cold of some sort. It was strange since it didn't have the
| runny nose or head congestion, but was predominantly
| breathing/cough related.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There was definitely _something_ going around late 2019
| /early 2020. I had it, and so did many people I know.
|
| But it's very unlikely it was Covid, because Covid is much
| more infectious _and_ more deadly than both colds and flu.
|
| People weren't masking or taking any precautions then, so
| Covid would have spread very quickly indeed. And that would
| have created an obvious medical emergency, with hospitals
| at full capacity and a clear peak in unexpected deaths.
|
| Relatively minor symptoms, no huge increase in
| hospitalisations, and no huge peak in deaths all suggest
| Covid wasn't the culprit.
| derivagral wrote:
| As someone who returned from Shanghai in mid-November with a
| light cough that worsened into a diagnosed "upper-respiratory
| viral infection" for ~3 weeks of misery on the couch... I wish
| I could confirm one way or the other!
| lamontcg wrote:
| You almost certainly didn't have it.
|
| In mid-November there could have only been cryptic spread
| around Wuhan. That means that maybe at the outside 3,000
| people around Wuhan had the virus at that point (which I'm
| likely being generous with that number). Your chances of
| having contracted it in Shanghai is low. 3,000 people sounds
| like a lot but China has a population of 1.4 billion people.
| Your odds are 1-in-500,000 -- and they're much lower given
| the geographical separation from Wuhan to Shanghai.
|
| You had a cold which developed into bronchitis.
|
| Now if you told me it was mid-January and that you lost your
| sense of smell so completely that you couldn't smell food
| burning on the stove and when it came back meat taste rancid,
| I'd agree you probably had it.
| didibus wrote:
| I think you can take an antibody test, if you had Covid (and
| assuming you didn't get the Covid vaccine or real Covid
| later), you should show signs of antibodies.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yes but even assuming he tests positive for antibodies , it
| is way more likely that it would be due to a more recent
| but completely asymptomatic infection rather than due to a
| very very early infection when the only few cases we know
| weren't even in the same region.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| From the linked article: "Of the 24,079 study participants with
| blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were
| seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first
| confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts,
| Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi."
|
| So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative
| (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio
| Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or
| had the virus at that point.
|
| That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been
| spreading for a while.)
| curiousllama wrote:
| > Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is
| likely not)
|
| That assumption is, uhm, doing a lot of work there
| infamouscow wrote:
| > Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is
| likely not)
|
| I can't think of anything more anti-science than dismissing
| data.
| korethr wrote:
| I don't think the phrase you quote is intended as a dismissal
| of the data. It comes across as an acknowledgement of the
| data's limitations, and a caution about what kind of
| conclusions can be drawn. During my statistics course in
| college, one of the first sections of the course covered
| sampling, and the various ways sampling can be done badly,
| thereby biasing the sample, and thereby leading to
| conclusions about the sampled population that don't reflect
| the reality of that population.
|
| Cautioning against that failure mode strikes me as
| intellectually honest, not anti-science.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| how is he dismissing data? questionable data should be
| treated as such... why would a linear extrapolation be a good
| fit here?
| rzimmerman wrote:
| I think they are implying that blood sampling is not a random
| sample of people (more likely to be from someone who is
| sick), not that it is inaccurate.
| Fomite wrote:
| Having worked with banked blood sample data before for
| influenza research, it's very, very much not representative.
| sct202 wrote:
| The PDF is at https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-
| article/doi/10.1093/cid... :
|
| Some details of the positive test collection dates by state:
| *Illinois Jan 7, Jan 20, Jan 22, Feb 21, Feb 24
| *Massachusetts Jan 8 *Wisconsin Feb 3
| *Pennsylvania Feb 15 *Mississippi Mar 6
|
| 5 were Black, 2 were Latino/Hispanic, 2 were White
|
| Page 20 shows that there was a lot of unbalance for the states
| with samples. Texas for example only had 84 samples processed,
| but Illinois had 2,426.
| teknopaul wrote:
| re:Black, Latino/Hispanic, White. Only in the US is speaking
| Spanish considered a race. I had to ask if I was Hispanic. I
| speak Spanish, live in Spain but I was told told its just the
| official racist term for Mexicans. N. B. there is no reason for
| them to even ask if you are or are not. And no, I could not
| chose to be Hispanic: its a term assigned to you. Some Spanish
| nationals are Hispanic some are not. Some Mexicans are not
| Hispanic. It does not matter where you were born or the colour
| of your skin. Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or
| are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you
| were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the
| US forever for "lying" on the visa form.
|
| That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.
| williesleg wrote:
| Fake news from the fakers.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The crucial bit of information is omitted - were these cases
| locally acquired or were they imported? Did the NIH follow up on
| that?
| 99_00 wrote:
| The real timeline is most certainly earlier than the official
| one.
|
| https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| It was already reported in Chinese national TV on Dec 31, 2019
| there was pneumonia with unclear reason:
| http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?i...
| felipellrocha wrote:
| My mother-in-law got a weird cold at around October where she
| lost her sense of smell for a few days.
| passivate wrote:
| So did my brother in Jan 2021. Turns out it was sinus related
| :)
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must
| have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social
| media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some
| sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people
| got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with
| skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted.
|
| The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often.
| I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip
| to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I
| could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had
| something that "surely might have been COVID".
| guilhas wrote:
| Last November/December was for me the strangest flu season
| ever, coughing and sneezing for abnormally long period, my
| coworkers and mother also. And after, in January, I got a
| really strange what looked like herpes in the face. Followed by
| finger infection which I had never had, which could mean my
| immune system was abnormally weak
|
| So that's that
| asdff wrote:
| Thats another variable here. People get older and are more
| weak over time. Diseases hit you worse in your 30s than in
| your 20s. Health conditions also tend to crop up after a
| certain age, like heart conditions that you might blame on a
| vaccine instead of just you getting older and being
| predisposed to this condition.
| giarc wrote:
| I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory
| viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical
| year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had
| some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc).
|
| The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if
| they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and
| weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost
| every other resp virus has disappeared.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I have a weird itch on my a-- right now. It is the next
| pandemic.
| deadite wrote:
| April last year, when this whole thing hit, we had people under
| throwaway accounts including myself speaking about this on HN,
| and as expected we hit a roadblock because anecdotes aren't data
| and whatever, so we were downvoted, called conspiracy theorists
| and other nonsense. There's ultimately nothing for any of us to
| gain in lying that we've been asked, by our doctors, going back
| to October of 2019, whether or not we've been to Wuhan (asked
| specifically and point blank).
|
| There's a lot more that we know than we are willing to share
| because HN just isn't a good platform for this sort of discussion
| anymore. It's too politicized and too many bruised, sensitive
| egos that can't handle contrary thinking. So for the rest of you,
| you'll have to get used to constantly having to shift and re-
| evaluate what you think you "know" and how you feel about a
| certain thing today, and the kind of statements and comments
| you've made in the past based on events that you think did or did
| not happen (because you've been told, and you believe what you're
| being told by the big media) when, in fact, it may turn out that
| the "truth" was factually incorrect or hidden from you to begin
| with.
|
| Take it however you may, just please don't shoot the messenger.
| tolbish wrote:
| Here is an example of a thread where we all knew for a fact
| that the virus could not have spread as early as it did:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963
| deadite wrote:
| Reminds me of this, which is a comically recurring thing on
| HN:
|
| https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-
| releases-i...
| seoaeu wrote:
| Wait, what evidence is there that the virus was spreading in
| August 2019? From a quick Google search, this source [0]
| published not long ago claims they think earliest it could
| possibly have been was mid-October of 2019.
|
| [0]: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-03-18-n
| ovel...
| tolbish wrote:
| It spread in the fall of 2019, which is late September,
| October, November, and December. That would put it in line
| with spreading in the US in December.
| javagram wrote:
| Hey, that's my post :-D I think it still holds up. The virus
| being "present" in the US in December isn't the same as being
| spread widely.
|
| This new NIH survey still offers no reason to doubt the
| timeline that the virus emerged around October 2019 in Wuhan
| and only became a serious threat in late November/December,
| when hospitalizations began to rise and some doctors started
| warning of a SARS re-emergence. A widespread COVID-19
| epidemic in Wuhan during August 2019 continues to seem
| unlikely to me.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| What I remember was people arguing that it was present
| earlier where also making the argument that infection was
| widespread. And thus the case fatality ratio was 100 times
| lower than the 0.7% the Chinese were reporting.
| qmmmur wrote:
| You sound kind of bruised with a big ego?
| nenaan wrote:
| Nytimes had articles on it in late dec 2019, and january 2020.
| April 2020 is months past my states emergency orders.
| deadite wrote:
| I agree. But people seemed to not be able to entertain the
| thought that doctors were aware something was happening back
| in October. In their minds, I think, if the big media did not
| have an article on it, then it doesn't exist. This is a
| grievous state of affairs for discussions, because it means
| NYT and others are effectively the Ministry of Truth for HN.
| elorant wrote:
| Dude, it's one thing sharing your experience, and a whole
| different to assume that doctors knew and are hiding
| something. Just because there were scattered cases here and
| there doesn't mean that the medical community could
| correlate them all and understand what they were dealing
| with.
| guscost wrote:
| Same with anyone who was saying "it's airborne" or "the case
| fatality rate is inflated" or "it could have leaked from that
| lab".
|
| And now, behold as the intellectual class attempts to delete
| these mistakes from our collective memory.
| whydoibother wrote:
| Case fatality rate wasn't inflated, it was deflated if
| anything.
|
| And there is still no real evidence of a lab leak, despite
| western intelligence continually lying about it.
| avs733 wrote:
| no one is deleteing anything...they are simply learning, as
| science does, and noting that prior knowledge was incorrect.
|
| That is fundamentally different from people screaming without
| evidence. A broken clock is right twice a day, but it is not
| an accurate clock at any point.
| guscost wrote:
| It was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and note the word "attempts".
| This one is much too big/high profile to delete,
| thankfully.
|
| The "this is just how to do science" defense is cute, but a
| lot people died and will die over it, and in general the
| conduct we have seen from formerly-trusted authorities is
| inexcusable. Most people are not going to let that gang of
| narrow-minded bullies "do science" to them ever again.
| avs733 wrote:
| a gang of narrow minded bullies?
|
| This is what we are calling the field that ended polio
| and smallpox.
| vadansky wrote:
| I'm sorry no, this is not "they are simply learning, as
| science does"
|
| People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested
| it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on
| something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a
| day
| avs733 wrote:
| I would argue, philosophically, the broken clock isn't
| right twice a day. That clock is simply saying the same
| thing as people who are right. It's claim about what time
| it is has no credibility.
|
| I have a friend who's Toddler knows that things have
| colors but only knows one color - Blue. If the child
| calls everything Blue it isn't showing understanding of
| the concept, even if the kid responds 'Blue' when asked
| what color the sky is. To claim that is 'right' is
| projecting my beliefs and knowledge onto the childs.
| guscost wrote:
| In my opinion you are completely right, but calling this
| out makes a lot of people very mad.
| avs733 wrote:
| I'm not mad, I just have been taught that retcon'ing
| evidence to fit a narrative is not the same thing as
| science. It doesn't matter how well it fits or evidence,
| it should be rejected because the base structure of the
| argument fails.
|
| These people aren't 'right' in the sense that they
| figured something out, they screamed about something
| without evidence.
|
| Whatever happens next cannot change that fact. Its
| notable that what is happening is the evidence is getting
| constantly substituted to fit an explanation not the
| explanation emerging from the available evidence.
|
| It's the boy who cried wolf...
| whydoibother wrote:
| Stop trying to tie it to your politics. Some people want
| real evidence before they scream about things like you
| do. It had little to do with Trump.
| vadansky wrote:
| Wrong because the alternative had no real evidence
| either.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| It absolutely had everything to do with Trump. He was
| slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19
| and George Floyd) presented political opportunities. In
| an election year, everything becomes about the election.
| People wanted to attack Trump at every turn, even when he
| suggested reasonable measures like controlling travel,
| and equally they wanted to ensure all blame was directed
| at Trump rather than the Chinese government or state
| governments or elsewhere.
|
| To address your claim more directly, there was never any
| justification to dismiss the lab leak theory, or claim it
| was debunked (as many news outlets did), or censor
| conversations about it online. This isn't about believing
| it is the only possibility, but that it is a likely
| possibility that deserves serious attention. The reason
| it was instead cloaked in dogmatic terms like "conspiracy
| theory" and shutdown outright, is purely because of
| politics. There was no "real evidence" to dismiss it as
| it was. And guess what - that dismissal also allowed the
| Chinese government to avoid a site visit for months, and
| even when the WHO visit happened, it was under the terms
| of the Chinese government with an untrustworthy outcome.
| Those who shutdown the lab leak theory and other such
| claims aren't interested in evidence. They're interested
| in political opportunism.
| whydoibother wrote:
| > there was never any justification to dismiss the lab
| leak theory
|
| that isn't how this works. extraordinary claims require
| extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab
| leak besides circumstantial.
|
| > censor conversations about it online
|
| they did a poor job of that then, considering all the
| very vocal people I had to hear keep talking about it for
| the last year.
|
| >He was slated to be the clear winner until two events
| (COVID-19 and George Floyd)
|
| weird how that works, huh? when you handle crises poorly
| -- or downright negligently -- people will hate you and
| not vote for you. strange.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| > extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
| there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides
| circumstantial.
|
| The claim is not exactly extraordinary - you have a lab
| with a history of poor controls, performing gain of
| function research relating to SARS-like viruses, knowing
| that SARS (the first one) had broken out of labs multiple
| times. That's not hard evidence, but it is a strong set
| of priors that makes the lab leak theory an obvious
| candidate for an origin story. It shouldn't be surprising
| that there isn't hard evidence when the world hasn't been
| allowed a timely and transparent investigation. And why
| would China allow such an investigation when there's no
| pressure to do so, when people are rushing to their
| defense to dismiss the valid lab leak theory as a
| "conspiracy theory"? Their work was done for them by news
| media and tech giants who institutionalized that
| dismissive attitude, again motivated by their own
| political biases. You can't have evidence until you take
| the speculation seriously and perform the necessary
| investigation properly, so I'm not sure how you could for
| "extraordinary evidence".
|
| > weird how that works, huh?
|
| You're ignoring the point I was making, which was that
| the people opposed to Trump were _desperate_ for any way
| to attack him, given that he was on a clear path to re-
| election. Since this was the only crisis at the time that
| they could leverage, they did so (and did so viciously).
| That included dismissing any scrutiny directed at China,
| even though it was valid.
| toast0 wrote:
| > People were against this emotionally since Trump
| suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing
| with him on something, even though a broken clock can be
| right twice a day
|
| Trump wanted to use some inappropriate names for the
| disease and wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC
| passports. Neither of those things make sense to do from
| a disease control standpoint. If you wanted to ban travel
| for people who had been in the area of exposure, that
| might make sense, but nation of passport isn't the way;
| and after not a whole lot of time, the disease had spread
| widely enough that there weren't really many places that
| should have been whitelisted.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| We very regularly associate things with their origin. We
| did so almost this entire last year when we talked about
| variants of COVID-19. And in the early days of COVID-19,
| in China, in their airports, the virus was called "Wuhan
| virus" on signage. Those names were also used in news
| reports regularly. I agree that something like "kung flu"
| is inappropriate, but I don't agree that "China virus" or
| "Wuhan virus" are inappropriate, and don't think they
| were controversial until they were deemed as such for
| what seems like political reasons.
|
| > wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports
|
| Banning by passport makes some sense. We can't prevent US
| citizens from returning to their homes. But we can
| prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make
| sense to ban all passports except the US for flights
| originating from China, but then you end up dragging in
| connecting flights through China from other countries. In
| terms of a quick, easy to implement measure, that will at
| least reduce the number of imported cases, banning travel
| based on PRC passports seems logical.
|
| > the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't
| really many places that should have been whitelisted
|
| Surely, given that we do care about just controlling the
| numbers even if it is not perfect (like with "flatten the
| curve"), it makes some sense to focus on the epicenter.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their
| homes.
|
| SCOTUS has ruled that the US does have quarantine powers
| for medical emergencies, even for its own citizens. Maybe
| a complete ban if poorly orchestrated might run afoul of
| the Constitution, but a policy like "all travelers [US
| citizen or not] from X region must present at <specific
| port of entry>, whereupon they will be transferred to a
| quarantine facility for 14 days" would totally be fine.
| Note, for example, the way that the quarantine on dogs
| because of rabies is being handled.
|
| > But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It
| might make sense to ban all passports except the US for
| flights originating from China, but then you end up
| dragging in connecting flights through China from other
| countries.
|
| Why should you exempt people whose only presence was via
| connecting flights? This generally involves long layovers
| inside of airports, where a large enough fraction is
| potentially susceptible to already be concerned about
| (due to local people making their flights), and you're
| likely to be spending a decent period of time on the
| plane with such people as well, too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwaway4good wrote:
| So what do you see if you examine blood samples further back than
| January 2020?
| aranazo wrote:
| They found covid-19 Antibodies in Italian blood samples from
| September 2019.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/
|
| PCR tests on Spanish sewer water found positive samples even
| earlier in 2019. I think the earliest so far French case was in
| early December 2019. I hope lots more studies are proceeding.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That aspect gets largely ignored in any discussion regarding
| Covids origin. Impossible to follow those really early cases
| up, tracing the infection lines I guess.
| reureu wrote:
| If you're reading this article and live in the US, you should
| really consider enrolling in the All of Us research study:
| https://www.joinallofus.org
|
| It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where
| they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used
| to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your
| contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many
| many others :)
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| In early December 2019 my son in the US West got something that
| perfectly matches covid: looked like a cold, it got bad and then
| he got better, then two days later is got much worse. So we took
| him to the hospital and they concluded he had pneumonia, and also
| that it was not the flu. We treated the pneumonia and he got
| better and we all moved forward. My other son and wife also got
| milder cases, while I was mostly fine (but not 100%). There's no
| way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly was not the
| Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid symptoms. We'll
| never know, unless somehow they find the stuff collected by the
| hospital and analyze it again.
| macksd wrote:
| I've heard quite a few stories like this, and anecdata though
| it may be, I find it very intriguing. How WOULD we know? There
| seems to me to be a pretty consistent timeline: confirmed cases
| and rampant spread in other countries, the first confirmed
| cases in the US and rampant spread among vulnerable populations
| (nursing homes, etc.), and subsequently the overwhelming of
| ICUs. Each step seemed to take a few weeks, and progress
| consistently. There's a lot of suspicion from some that things
| were misreported, and some of that is the typical lies-with-
| statistics, etc. but I know enough people who were working in
| nursing homes and in ICUs that I personally trust the general
| timeline to be reality.
|
| So what's up with these early possible cases? I wonder how
| plausible it is that it there was some early spread of the same
| disease, but vulnerable populations were just luckily avoiding
| exposure. It really seemed to take off in the US in those
| nursing homes. IIRC that's what happened in Seattle, and that's
| what happened in my county. THAT'S what wiped out most of our
| body count, and that's what initially overwhelmed ICUs. And
| that's what raised a lot of awareness, and probably a few self-
| diagnosed false positives too. Could genuine COVID cases have
| been going around before then and just not getting the
| attention, or causing as much damage until that point?
| p_j_w wrote:
| >How WOULD we know?
|
| Antibody tests after the fact would reveal whether or not
| these were Covid cases. You'd have to be tested before the
| antibodies disappeared, though.
| jsnell wrote:
| No. We have plenty of ways of detecting a large scale Covid
| epidemic after the fact, even if it ended up somehow avoiding
| all people from the risk groups. Analysis of historical blood
| samples for antibodies. Early population-wide antibody tests.
| Phylogenetic analysis. Wastewater analysis.
|
| Think of just how contagious Covid would have been before we
| knew about it and started taking precautions. You could only
| introduce Covid into a country a few times before it'd
| inevitably start a self-sustaining transmission chain. We
| have no credible proof of that happening in the west until
| 2020.
| ds206 wrote:
| Isn't that what the study is suggesting though? They are
| looking back (like you point out) and finding it earlier
| than we all thought?
| jsnell wrote:
| That is the kind of study they did, yes. And the results
| are consistent with commonly accepted timeline, not with
| the "I had Covid in October 2019 but they covered it up"
| crackpots.
|
| The prevalence they found is extremely low, less than
| 0.05%, despite their samples going all the way back to
| Mid-March. Since they did not test on any samples that
| are definitely pre-Covid (e.g. early 2019, late 2018), we
| can't calibrate their false positive rate. But if we
| assume the specificity of the tests was 99% which seems
| on the high end for antibody tests, and that the false
| positives are uncorrelated, we're already in the region
| of false positives feasibly explaining literally all of
| their samples.
|
| The data is just totally inconsistent with any kind of
| widespread transmission of Covid in the US in 2019.
| toast0 wrote:
| How many of your detection mechanisms were actually carried
| out?
|
| I think the most useful measure that was actually carried
| out were the handful of places that take samples for flu
| surveilance that were able to retest the samples for covid.
| Of course, in many places, you can't actually convince a
| doctor to take a sample for flu-like illness, so there's no
| data.
| jsnell wrote:
| All of them have been done in practice, of course.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > There's no way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly
| was not the Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid
| symptoms
|
| Many things match those symptoms though, such as other strains
| of coronaviruses e.g. HKU1 or NL63, which although rare, were
| certainly more prevalent in the US in december 2019 thant SARS-
| CoV-2
| bluetwo wrote:
| You can get antibody tests now to find out.
| negativegate wrote:
| If you've also been vaccinated is it possible to distinguish
| that?
|
| Edit: I suppose in this case they could test prior samples,
| but if you don't have any, you're out of luck?
| mattzito wrote:
| I know this! It depends on the antibody test - if you can
| get a test for the nucleocapsid antibodies, that will
| determine whether you had the disease or not. People who
| are vaccinated will test positive for the spike protein,
| but will not test positive for the nucleocapsid antibodies,
| at least with the vaccines currently available (I believe
| there are vaccines in development that target both
| proteins, but not yet available).
|
| Some antibody tests target spike or nucleocapsid, some
| target both, so you need to check which tests they are
| using and verify what it tests against (or ask your doctor
| to order a specific test that checks for the nucleocapsid
| antibodies).
|
| I learned this when I was part of a vaccine study and was
| curious to know whether I had gotten the vaccine or the
| placebo, and was able to use a spike antibody test to
| confirm that I was in the vaccine group.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I wonder if it's theoretically possible to construct a
| historical timeline of immunity development for an
| individual by taking multiple tests, sounds like a proper
| forensics work than something to do just out of curiosity.
| baseballdork wrote:
| Donate blood with the red cross and they'll test for
| antibodies. I had a miserable flu-like illness over Christmas
| '19. It's probably the sickest I had ever been in my life.
| When the publicity started blowing up over the pandemic, my
| dad suggested that maybe I had caught it while I was
| traveling for job interviews in the previous weeks and
| months. I eventually donated blood in 2020 and sure enough, I
| tested false for antibodies. I've donated twice since, and
| the first was negative. Waiting to see what the next one says
| since I've been vaccinated.
| tkahnoski wrote:
| Similar experience but late December/early Jan after a flight.
| I got a terrible cough and was laid up for a day and my
| youngest got Pneumonia and was notably "our-of-breath" for a
| few weeks afterwards.
|
| So I have always wondered, however this occurred during holiday
| gatherings and no one else in the group really got it so I've
| kind of written it off as some 'other' less contagious virus.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Did you lose your sense of smell or taste?
|
| I have dozens of friends who report a terrible cold with many
| of these symptoms during the Dec19-Jan20 time period. I had
| it myself. What's notable about all these anecdotes is that
| not a single one of them remembers experiencing the #1 most
| distinctive COVID symptom: losing the sense of smell. Of
| course, not every COVID sufferer experiences that, but you'd
| think if there was an outbreak of real COVID during that time
| we'd have heard a lot of reports of it. Take a look at all
| the people reporting being sick back then on this HN thread
| alone -- nobody leads with the most distinctive COVID
| symptom.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think this is a good argument for the government to start a
| program to do an ongoing "serological census".
|
| On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and
| freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If
| there's ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of,
| this would give us the data before we're even aware of its
| existence.
| shalmanese wrote:
| That feels like a wonderfully efficient way to generate a
| continuously fertile crop of new conspiracy theories.
| nexuist wrote:
| Here's a simple one: do we really trust a government agency
| (or hell, anyone really) to collect intimate and identifiable
| data about our bodies all while preserving anonymity and
| securing the data from nation state attackers? Do we trust
| nameless data scientists to run SQL queries over us that
| aren't intended to determine which ones of us will be
| smarter, stronger, more violent, etc? Do we trust politicians
| that have not yet been elected to office to use this data for
| benevolent purposes like our current politicians would (if we
| trust our current politicians)?
|
| Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it
| would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester
| inside of concerned populations and spread to non-
| controversial parts of the government such as the post office
| and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not
| just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented
| immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a
| good chunk of Jews.
| mrfusion wrote:
| With consent. Please say with consent.
| newsbinator wrote:
| I'm surprised they don't already do that?
| giarc wrote:
| The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low.
| Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the
| US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly
| sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the
| population every month to catch a rare event like that.
| bhickey wrote:
| Run pooled testing on blood donations, sewage or airplane
| waste water.
| passivate wrote:
| How do you develop a storage buffer for things you haven't even
| encountered? Also, freezing and thawing is an imperfect process
| that can damage cells. Sure we might luck out too..
|
| But yeah, like the other poster said, the bill-gates-
| corona-5G-mind-control-implant folks are going to have a field
| day with that :D
| aphextron wrote:
| I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid
| month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil.
| Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though,
| so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and
| we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in
| retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly
| terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it
| was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just
| returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have
| just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain
| of flu, I suppose.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard. I
| am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold
| that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the
| timing was definitely odd.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the timing was definitely odd.
|
| A nasty cold or flu hitting in the middle of cold and flu
| season isn't _that_ odd, as timing goes.
|
| Sure, in 2020 it's a coincidence that naturally raises the
| "was it COVID?" question, but not really odd timing if it
| wasn't.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| The timing was odd because of how severe the cough was. I
| have had plenty of colds through out my life, and this was
| by far the worst.
| asdff wrote:
| Another variable is that you are also older with a less
| robust immune system than when you've had colds in your
| youth. This is why anecdotes are always worthless. You
| need statistical power to overcome these latent variables
| that could be biasing your conclusions.
| ssully wrote:
| It's possible you had covid, but I think the odds are
| stronger that you just had a different respiratory
| illness that was going around at the time.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have
| antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure
| enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had
| covid in the past few months prior.
|
| Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how
| they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy
| eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed
| like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe
| _anything_ to definitely having covid. I am not sure why
| this was - doesn 't seem like people do this so much now.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever
| had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a
| case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have
| caught covid.
|
| And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was
| COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was
| definitely something that was going around at that time.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I had one of the flu variants (tested positive for flu)
| from 2019-20 in December, followed by a really bad cold
| (no tests) in Feb, followed by COVID (confirmed by tested
| contacts, an antibody test and a fully checked "weird
| COVID symptoms" bingo card) in March.
|
| 2019-20 was definitely a season for nasty colds/flus, not
| just COVID.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want
| to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not
| sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so
| much now.
|
| I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was
| the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had
| Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had
| not had Covid.
|
| The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can
| be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without
| having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).
| jagger27 wrote:
| Did anyone from your office later catch covid? If anyone did,
| the lack of immunity would suggest it wasn't.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Not that I am aware of.
| toast0 wrote:
| My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between
| Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe
| COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms
| point more towards whooping cough.
|
| Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child
| and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll
| never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the
| fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual
| spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.
| e40 wrote:
| Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan
| 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break.
| Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart
| palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect
| that pretty much nails it as covid for me.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| First time I've seen i18n used like this in the wild.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu
| for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the
| hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt
| "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes
| have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a
| cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion, which I normally
| should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like,
| crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve
| the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have
| thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later.
| No one else around me caught it.
| eynsham wrote:
| Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections
| in the US before they were first detected; they don't suggest
| that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less
| likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that
| the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on
| current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is
| plausible, 'almost impossible' looks to me like it's rather
| understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of
| Covid.
| stadium wrote:
| Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which
| was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am
| almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health
| should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some
| serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very
| ill as well.
|
| I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were
| restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite
| being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night
| because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong
| antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to
| help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse
| because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the
| intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with
| each case.
|
| All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to
| get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death
| bed.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them
| caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the
| last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about
| as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only
| had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at
| first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but
| probably should have anyway.
| stordoff wrote:
| I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough,
| full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the
| same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw
| my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It
| left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19,
| particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it
| seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases.
|
| I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and
| was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the
| first illness was something else.
| newsbinator wrote:
| I had something similar in 2017
| docderanged wrote:
| yo aphex want to talk like a man or do i have to give out the
| information about you and how you have child porn on your
| computer? i dont want to get you fired and go to your house man
| jsut hit me up in my temp email eponuts2022@gmail.com or im
| goign to have to let your boss know and show him all the screen
| shots
| docderanged wrote:
| what is your adress in north carolina i want to see you face to
| face since your bitch ass wont let me know whats up over the
| internet, fuck you alex , im watchign you man you should go to
| jail alex
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