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Comment by tjansen | Hacker News Reader

About 6 weeks ago, I had a cold. I didn't think much about it, because at that time the virus wasn't supposed to have arrived here (reports started a week later). I had a dry cough initially, chills on two nights, but without fever, and some light trouble of breathing, which isn't that unusual for me in Winter and I blamed on my allergic asthma. However, when it was mostly over, I noticed that I wasn't able to smell my daughter's dirty diapers. Usually I am pretty good at smelling her even if she's in another room, but I smelled absolutely nothing, even when changing the diaper. That was long before I read the first reports of anosmia. Ever since I wonder whether I already got it.. I guess I will never know..

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I had pretty bad Corona-like symptoms in late January/Feb in London. There was documented community transmission at that point, but it was very early (single digits) so it's technically possible but not mathematically likely that I had it.

The more I've mentioned this to people, the more I've heard people bring up their own stories and theories that they all had super bad flus this year unlike any other year and are all convinced they already had COVID. So everyone has convinced themselves that they already got it, no matter what city they were in at the time and whether they got sick in November or February.

This is hard to grapple with because I'm sure that any give year, a lot of people randomly get a bad flu like they've never had before with unique symptoms. And if you happen to be that person this year, then of course you would think you had this new disease that matches the symptoms. But given the lack of secondary community effects at the same time (other hospitalizations in your area), it's more likely that most of us are wrong and it's just a co-incidence. But if you are the person suffering the coincidence, it appears the same as if you are the person who actually got infected.

So who knows? I guess until antibody tests are widely available, none of us will know for sure.

This sort of thing reminds me of a story about the Seattle windshielding pitting phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...

The point is, often things that are quite common but otherwise unnoticed all of a sudden appear to be an outbreak due to some sort of new found public consciousness. Everybody is analyzing their latest cough and fever so you are going to get a lot more stories of people with coronavirus symptoms even if people getting those sorts of symptoms is quite common (relatively speaking). It's just reporting of those symptoms has increased.

With respect to COVID-19, the real sign of its unusualness is the increase in hospital admissions for respiratory issues.

There were an increase in outbreaks, flu related deaths, and I believe hospitalizations around the end of the year in California when comparing 2018 to 2019.

2018 https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/CDPH%20Document%20...

2019 https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/CDPH%20Document%20...

I could be just the flu, but it could also be the start of something else circulating with the flu. Even in that case odds are that something else was not covid-19, but it could be. The only way to tell would be to test blood collected at the time for serological evidence of covid-19.

Yes, one of the things we need to do to get past all of this is to widely test for antibodies. I am really hoping that comes soon.

A similar thing I've noticed is people want to believe they've had it. My fiends are often often say things like:

"Yeah I had a mild fever last week, I probably had it"

Which to me translates to: "I hope I got off so easily and now I'm immune and can get on with my life".

I don't have a source handy, I think it was Prof. Drosten, but I've read that in Germany, there were many such anecdotal stories as well. The blood serum of these people got tested, and there was no indication that any of them had already had covid-19.

Of course, that's Germany, not London or the US, but at least there, the evidence currently points to a bad flu or something else for all these people from November to February.

The flu season just past was unusually bad, even by comparison with e.g. 2017-18, which was itself no walk in the park.

It's not a safe bet for anyone to assume on that basis that they've already had the coronavirus and are now immune. Those bad flu-like symptoms were flu symptoms, and confer no immunity against SARS-CoV-2.

Yes. I remember pre-covid a lot of people in the UK were looking at Australia's flu season which was really rough -- hospitalising a lot more people than usual flu seasons -- and we were trying to get as many staff and patients immunised as possible.

We were looking at tweets like this in June 2019: https://twitter.com/drdhanlon/status/1137512141970399232?s=2...

Or this: https://twitter.com/SFHTCOO/status/1151783951016628226?s=20

The basic theory is most people have a bad flu every year then forget about it. As far as I recall I've had the flu exactly twice in my life. Once this year, once last year.

I'm in quite the same boat. Heavily affected area. My whole family was sick in the period around the first notified case in the country. All the typical symptoms, but no-one severe. My wife still hardly smells.

... and still. I think it's a social psychology phenomenon. If I talk to our baker, her family has the same story. Friends as well. We all might like to believe we've had it and so we lightly skew the facts to fit our perception and hope. What I know as a fact (data released today) is that mortality was not rising in my region until two weeks after 'patient zero'. In our case three weeks after the first ill kid.

Occam's razor: It would be very hard to imagine wide-spread asymptomatic cases without symptomatic cases and deaths. No deaths means no spread. So we had something else.

I've heard this a lot, but there is another possible explanation - just speculating - that covid did appear and we're in the middle of a 2nd and more dangerous wave. IIRC 1918 flu behaved a bit like this, 2nd wave was more deadly. I'd really like to know if that's plausible, if any disease experts could speculate.

But what’s the theory then? If there was a widespread milder version of covid going around in places long before the deadly one took hold, then the newer deadlier strain would still have to be transmitted into each region separately. I don’t think it’s feasible that the mild strain spread globally and then flipped a switch and turned much deadlier all around the globe.

When would the first wave have happened? If it were in the last year we'd see immune response to the virus in the antibody tests now rolling out. And if happened before the current wave we'd expect to see a substantial degree of herd immunity and not be having the current epidemic spread so fast.

...I just saw a comment somewhere on here, possibly in another post, of someone wondering why took so long to spread given asymptomatic + pre-symptom spreading.

What would make it more deadly? AFAIK second wave of 1918 was a mutated virus. This one is more stable and has now significant mutations yet.

I don't know what you mean by "now significant mutations" but there are quite a number (hundreds) of known cov-19 mutant circulating.

https://nextstrain.org/ncov?c=country&l=unrooted

It means that most of those genetic variants don't change which proteins are coded for (the genetic code is redundant) and the remaining ones don't make any difference to disease progression. Well, there was one mutation in Singapore where one of the non-structural proteins got knocked out creating a strain that was less virulent but better able to hide from the immune system. Zoonaotic diseases usually become less virulent over time in general and a strain like that might become dominant after a number of years. But don't expect any noticeable changes in during the current outbreak except maybe in a few small pockets.

The ambiguity I was addressing was grammatical, not biological.

"now significant" could be a typo for "known significant", "non-significant", "no significant", "not significant", and possibly others, including not being a typo at all.

Likewise "significant" itself could mean different things in this context. E.g. phenotype neutral mutations can be highly informative when tracing origins, mutations in "non-coding" regions can have huge regulatory effects, etc.

I agree that your interpretation of the post to which I responded is plausible, but it's not the only one.

Good question, I don't know. Maybe the much milder strain went by so quistly there was no testing for a novel disease so we never knew. I don't know if that's plausible though.

It is not hard to imagine. If the number of serious cases is very low compared to total cases it will take a massive number of infected till serious cases start to stand out.

> ...sick in November....

An acquaintance of mine was actually sick in November with COVID-like symptoms. They had a dry cough that was so nasty, doctors tested them for whooping cough (pertussis) and it was negative. And, it actually was not too long after their office got a visit from some overseas partners from China. IIRC, they even said one of the Chinese visitors had a bit of a cough at the time. I think this is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they may have had the virus. At the very least, it's enough evidence that this person should definitely get an antibody test as soon as practical.

Edit: I initially forgot to include that the pertussis test was negative, although that was certainly implied.

Holy frickin crap

I had what I thought was definitely whooping cough in November. Tested negative and thought well there is definitely going to be a new disease surfacing.

Skip ahead and covid 19 happens. I thought, this is definitely what I had.

However, the faux whooping cough lasted months and the cough was very characteristic, cough so hard you struggle to breathe back in. It doesn't chime perfectly with covid-19, I've yet to hear of a cough lasting more than 2 weeks.

But what was this mysterious "whooping cough"

The flu was bad this year in early Feb. I had what I call covid symptoms but I tested positive for the flu.

My mother-in-law had an absolutely BRUTAL flu in early February. It was so bad my sister-in-law had to live with her for a while and take care of her. She had really, really bad fevers and an absolutely horrible dry cough that seems to have left some lasting damage even now. It took her about 3 weeks to get better.

There's no evidence that it was Covid-19. But she is a nanny for a family of doctors in Boston so it's not impossible that it's it.

Yeah, this year has been especially weird for me. I typically don't get sick with the flu or common cold - until Dec 12 last year, which I remember well because it was immediately after a convention, I'm usually not affected by con crud, and it affected me that Thursday and Saturday (but I was fine on Friday and afterwards except for a cough that's repeatedly come and gone since then).

It really doesn't fit the timeline since it didn't officially hit the US until a month and a half later, so I don't think this is what I had then, but still, there are reports that this was active in China in November, so sometimes it really makes me wonder.

In the beginning phases of testing in Denmark they found that 9 out of 10 people who showed symptoms had a bad flu or a cold. The past couple of months have been peak flu season

At the moment in Alberta, they are testing about 4K people per day, and only those showing significant or serious symptoms. Even with that filter for serious symptoms, only 2% of tests are positive. Unfortunately, this probably means that most of our flus this season, that we got over, was not us building up immunity to Covid - where I live at least.

I worry about people catching Covid and another flu simultaneously

As family we had a pretty 'bad' flu in February here in Czechia. Correction, not a bad flu - but the worst ever. It matched most of the symptoms - including coming in 2 waves.

Youngest child went almost with no symptoms. The one with strongest immune system suffered a lot.

This was 3 weeks before first confirmed cases.

I was sick in September/October with a cold, then left with anosmia for a few weeks. Saw a specialist who prescribed nasal steroids. No fever though. Never had amnosmia before in my life, and an pretty healthy. Anosmia is scary.

Is this not what the "Oxford study" posits, namely that many more of us have had it than we think? I believe that the transmission stats from the Diamond Princess are a strong counter argument, but by all means dig into it.

I’ve heard many stories like this, but I’m wondering how it could have had that much transmission that long ago without there being a noticeable number of unusual pneumonia deaths in those regions.

Same here. London also. The reason I believe it was it was that everyone in a group event over 3 days had some kind of in parameter illness subsequently.

Usually in office style flus only a subset of people get it.

I had a couple of pretty gnarly colds this last year, and so did lots of people. They have been going around.

I also have noticed my sense of smell come and go with lots of infections.

Pay attention to the rollout of antibody tests. When available, those will tell you whether your blood contains immunoglobulins targeting the virus, and thus whether you've had it.

If you have, consider also paying attention to news about serum transfusion projects in your area. That's a process by which an immune person donates antibody-containing plasma, which is then transfused into patients with active disease or at-risk people to supplement their immune system with "targeting data" for the disease. It can significantly improve people's chances, and is one of the longer-term (and admittedly less likely, since no one is really certain yet whether or how well it'll work) possibilities I'm looking at for how to effectively volunteer as an immune person once my own COVID-19 case resolves.

Poor college student story. Years ago when I was in college, a friend of mine was overjoyed when he got mono. Turns out a place in town would let you sell your blood, and they gave you a lot if you had just had it.

trials are starting, here's hoping it works out!

Yeah I'm in an Asian country and a lot of people I know think they had it two months ago.

For anyone watching government reactions from January, it's clear that testing was not thorough in any meaningful way in Asian nations for at least 3 months after the outbreak began in Wuhan, including truly minimal screening at airports over those months.

In other words there's an order of magnitude greater undiagnosed cases out there than reported, and I believe that fact is so clear that it should be part of mainstream coverage.

The exception being South Korea. They have been demonstrating an optimal response to this pandemic. Test everyone as fast as possible, isolate those who are positive.

No, I'm talking about the literal months before the first case was even announced in SK.

That assumes that in 100 years optimality of response will be defined as fewest possible deaths in this outbreak?

(I am not saying that is not going to be true, but if the virus doesn't get effectively eradicated then it may well not end up being so? Not An Expert At All, just spitballing)

I would say that 'optimal' can loosely be defined as 'minimal negative impact to society.'

They are showing that a virus can be contained if dealt with quickly and in a coordinated fashion. This results in fewer people getting ill (and dying) as well as minimizing economic impact.

What else might 'optimal' be?

I think GP is saying that SK might be trading short term death rate for long term death rate.

Under what circumstances would you expect an infection in the future to be more likely to cause death than an infection right now? Maybe some fad treatment will be embraced by everybody that does more harm than good? Maybe the world economy will collapse and nobody will be able to manufacture ventilators any more?

Any scenario I come up with seem very implausible compared to the idea that as we learn more about the virus our ability to treat it will improve.

Will truly only find out when random antibody tests are done in the population. I personally doubt it was already widely spread before as otherwise

1. the number of people dying from respiratory problems would have spiked up specially among the older population

2. The number of people each infected person infects that he knows points to the virus not having passed through the population before

this would be great news as it would considerably blunt future waves of the disease after lockdowns are lifted.

Antibody tests that can detect whether you have the antibodies that the immune system develops while combating the disease already exist and will become common-place and cheap at some point. So then you will be able to know...

> because at that time the virus wasn't supposed to have arrived here

I heard that’s why several countries denied testing initially even when symptoms matched: “you can’t have coronavirus because there’s no coronavirus in <country>.” Which is rather stupid considering <country> can’t “have” coronavirus if they just deny testing.

I just didn't feel bad enough to go to a doctor. Back then fever was still considered one of the symptoms, and I didn't have any. I should add that I live in Germany and our first major outbreak was in Heinsberg, not too far away from here, and my symptoms started about 4 days after being at the local kids carnival, the same kind of event that caused the outbreak in Heinsberg. On the other hand, only my kids got sick roughly at the same time, but no one I know had similar symptoms...

> Back then fever was still considered one of the symptoms, and I didn't have any.

Wikipedia still lists fever as the most common symptom (87.9%), before dry cough (67.7%). But their data is from a middle of February WHO report. Is there a more recent list of symptom frequency?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Signs...

> there's no coronavirus in <country>.

Reminds me of stuff like "there are no gay people in $COUNTRY." [0]

---

[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/asia/malaysia-tourism-ministe...

Same for me. I've had one of the worst colds of my life in mid January. Symptoms were sore throat (very briefly), light nose congestion, a very strong and long-lasting dry cough, chills for about 2 nights, light fever and light chest pains. Then, I was worried about developing a bacterial pneumonia.

When I heard about the coronavirus in the beginning of February, I dismissed the possibility because of the timeline. How could it have arrived so early in Portugal?

I still don't think it was Covid-19, but recently got doubts when I heard it might have been circulating in Italy before January. We also had one of the first Covid-19 cases in the region of Lisbon in an institute co-located with ours. Many of my colleagues are Italian and most of them visited Italy during Christmas until New Year. So I'm no longer sure.

You can do a serological test (IgG/IgM) that looks for antibodies to the Coronavirus. It is a fast test and will tell you if you have had it in the past and you can safely be around people who have an active infection.

> guess I will never know..

Well, you could take an antibody test when they become available. The first occurrence of the virus in Europe (I suppose?) is almost certainly underestimated. I'll add a reference to the paper if I find it again later.

EDIT: Found it: [1] J. Lourenc ̧o, R. Paton, M. Ghafari, M. Kraemer, C. Thompson, P. Simmonds, P. Klenerman, and S. Gupta. Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the sars-cov-2 epidemic. 2020.

Did your sense of smell return?

Yes, I believe it's still weaker, but could also be that my daughters diapers are just not as smelly anymore :)

Use Nasicort for a few weeks. Smell came back in about a week for me. (Previously, stuck my nose in fresh coffee grounds, nothing at all. Scary.)

You should definitely do a simple blood Antibody test once they’re available. It’s definitely worth a lot to know if you already had it or not

Same for me and my wife, we had these symptoms prior to the reported first case at the time, but this week the government (Brazil) discovered that a person who died in late January has tested positive, this is one month before the previously announced first case.

I lost my sense of smell and was very tired 3 weeks ago, but otherwise I had no symptoms. I'm super curious to find out whether I had it already, although my SO was asymptomatic in the same timeframe so it seems unlikely.

I have similar story, end of February in my case. Runny nose, juicy, rather ordinary amount of cough, no fever, but loss of smell and taste for a few days, which is usually not part of it.

> I guess I will never know..

Isn't there a covid immunity test coming soon. I am in the same boat.

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