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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I live in MA and got very sick on Feb 26, then had a horrible cold. My wife is a doctor, and she thought I just had one of the many things going around.

I asked her if it was COVID-19 and she looked at the CDC's web site and said she didn't think so. Then a week later she flew out of Logan to spend a weekend in LA. I also went skiing in New Hampshire twice, and went to two networking events!

Throughout March I had symptoms that I never had in my life... I couldn't get a test! The symptoms went away after 4 weeks.

Did I have it? I have no idea, but if I got it, it most likely came from her or my kids, who all felt kinda wonky in mid February. My wife had a very bad headache two weeks before I got sick.

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In Germany, the lead virologist in Berlin said that in the beginning they went after cases like yours, testing people who had weird symptoms in February, or even late January, because the hypothesis that the virus had been circulating in Europe for quite some time seemed plausible at the time. None of these cases tested positive.

I'm not saying you didn't have COVID-19, just that it's very unreliable to draw any conclusions from anecdotal evidence like this.

Absolutely, I also had a strange flu that could have been it in early to mid February. First I dismissed Covid,but later I did find a one hop link with someone who was tested positive. But until I can get tested (or my intermediary) its just guesswork.

None of those cases tested positive, but what kind of test did they have? PCR only identifies an active infection. Need antibody testing if not currently infected.

I don’t know. I can only assume they took this into account. I don’t want to be condescending, but do you really think that you just thought of a rather trivial catch that a bunch of expert virologists didn’t think of?

I don't want to be condescending, but did you ever stop to think that the serum tests were not available then?

If they did PCR tests, and didn’t consider that N days (I don’t know the number) after infection you don’t have virus RNA anymore, they’re stupid. Really stupid. If they did think of it and now the guy claims this proves there was no virus flying around, he’s simply lying. Until shown otherwise, I will assume that the leading virologist in Germany and a respected public figure is neither stupid nor lying.

The question rather is if someone is able to pass on the virus, which is the relevant point today. And the PCR test is perfectly suited to check that.

Same! In mid-February I went to a party. A couple of my friends were getting over "a really weird cold" that "everyone in the office had". A few days later, I was sick with the same symptoms, mostly a dry cough. I thought nothing of it except that it was very unusual for the kinds of colds that I usually get (I am a sore throat and aches guy, so I was thrown off by not aching and having a cough). I had this for a couple weeks.

I wasn't working at the time, but it was minor enough that I would have gone to work. That is also very rare for me, usually I am out of commission for a week when I get a cold.

Was it Coronavirus? I have no way of knowing. But looking back, it seems very suspicious. An extra-infectious cold with the same symptoms of Coronavirus going around the New York office populated by people that travel internationally extensively? You have to wonder.

I kind of assume that Coronavirus cases are massively underreported. Given that 20% of cases are people without symptoms, what would prompt them to get tested? And all the advice I've read is along the lines of "if you think you have it, don't get tested, just stay home and get over it". With that advice, I have to assume that many cases are not accounted for in the official data. It does seem strange to me that if Coronavirus was circulating in New York in mid-February that it didn't show up at all until early March "officially", though. It's unlikely that not one person would have severe symptoms. For that reason, I assume I'm not immune and am self-isolating like everyone else... but if I can get an antibody test, I would love one. I am very curious as to what happened there.

One thing about case reporting is that they tend to ignore the denominator, the number of tests.

I've been tracking DPH reports in our state since they started, and one thing I've noticed is that although the case counts have gone up, the probability of testing positive has remained roughly constant. It's increased slightly here in the last week or so but not a lot.

One thing this suggests to me is that at least here, the virus was present in significant numbers before they started testing, or at least in similar numbers.

If you combine that with consistent reports of substantial fractions of asymptomatic carriers, it seems very plausible to me that the virus was circulating before authorities in the US started tracking it.

Even if it wasnt Sars-COV-2, something odd was going around as early as December and January, all over the country. Everyone who got it said it was like nothing they had before. The cough was horrible, and it caused headaches in less symptomatic people.

I'm kind of glad to hear other people reporting similar events. I too had a really weird cold in Jan/Feb that left me coughing and very short of breath after simple activities like running up the stairs. Before the lockdown, I was a 5-day-a-week gym-goer, so this was very unusual.

It wasn't until the shutdown occurred that I read about the symptoms and noted that shortness of breath was a tell-tale symptom. I also worked at a place with offices in Shanghai and many Chinese nationals working locally.

Sounds similar to what happened to me, I had a dry cough come on around March 17 and initially thought it was allergies, but those aren't my normal symptoms (sneezing and itchy eyes). I had heard enough rumblings about asymptomatic cases that I decided to completely isolate until it went away just in case. The cough got moderately bad the following weekend and then slowly cleared up over the next week and a half. The only other thing that was any different than normal was that my appetite was roughly half of what it normally is but I chalked that more up to just being home all the time and not doing a whole lot.

Just chiming in to say I had the same "weird cold" at the end of February, all the way in Israel. I had just a day of a minor fever but before and after I had an exceptionally sore throat, coughing, general lack of focus to really do anything, and somehow no stuffy nose etc. at all. I'm used to some colds hitting worse at first then transitioning to a real cold afterwards, but a week later I only had the cough left. I didn't go to work those two weeks because of that cough, which got better but lingered for another (3rd) week.

And now I remembered 5-7 days before any cold-like symptoms started, I was at a couple work functions that included our entire US office. (So there's the possible trans-atlantic link)

I'm also waiting for an antibody test purely because of that weird experience.

My mother-in-law had an awful fever and dry cough unlike any I've ever seen in mid-February that lasted for ages. Chalked it up to the flu. Went to the doc and everything, but this was before Covid-19 had officially landed anywhere near us.

It's certainly possible that it's been around longer than expected, growing exponentially, hidden in the flu season, but we just recently reached the exponential turning point that makes it a big problem. It only starts killing when it's saturated enough of the population that the at-risk start dying in greater-than-usual numbers, which might take quite a while even with a relatively fast doubling rate.

The same here. I maybe had the virus. Symptoms that felt different, but nothing to worry about, a little headache and a little cough.

So I never got tested.

My wife and kids also had this but also nothing to worry about. And at the same time other Carona types are going around with mostly the same symptoms. So who knows what we got.

But when it turns out people get resistant after having COVID-19 I would like to know if I had it. Because then I don't have to worry anymore about infecting others.

I had a similar experience and I really would love to know if I had COVID-19 or not.

I did some work traveling in the US Minnesota <-> North Carolina late January into February and came down with a flu-like thing.

I say flu-like because I had some symptoms you'd just say was seasonal flu except I had a few other things going on that were unusual. Shortness of breath and dry cough with low fever.

The condition was persistent but mild, it lasted about two weeks except I _STILL_ suffer shortness of breath.

After I came home I'm pretty sure I passed this along to several people despite usual "I'm sick, stay away" considerations (pre social distancing days), several coworkers and my wife got sick.

Antibody tests can't come fast enough. I'm sure this thing is/was far wider spread than thought.

My family lives in MD, and same thing happened to us in Feb. A child in our daughter's daycare came down with severe pneumonia and ended up in the hospital, our daughter was sick with diarrhea and fever for a week, and my wife caught a bad cough that lasted for weeks and had trouble breathing.

Thing is, we cannot know at this point whether everyone already has covid-19, since there are no anti-body tests. It is a live possibility, but meanwhile we are shutting down the world's economy.

We know when Coronavirus entered the US and the serial interval, and can estimate via phylogeny how big the population of the virus is. The phylogenics+excess deaths are ruling out a mass infection that no one died from.

How do we know when covid-19 entered the US? How do we know the R0? R0 is continually being estimated upward and death rate downward. We don't seem to have much clarity on any of this.

Another problem is if covid-19 was already widespread, it would have been misclassified before the huge spotlight. So, increase in cases and deaths could be misattributed.

If there is an overall increase in excess deaths, we still have a question of causality. Could the measures we are instituting themselves contribute to deaths? Just a lot of questions and lack of clarity in this matter.

Staying at home in NYC causes bilateral ground glass infiltrates and causes morgues to overflow?

Sequencing produces phylogenetic trees and the mutation rate lets the nodes be dated. This is how the Seattle cluster was found.

I don't know what the glass infiltrate is, but morgues overflowing could be a symptom of the government shutdown. For example, in Ecuador, there are bodies just lying on the street because the shutdown and general alarm about the virus means there are less people removing the deceased. The deceased are themselves not necessarily dead from covid-19 (although the news article headlines are worded ambiguously in that regard...).

In general, I see a lot of confusion and lack of clarity, along with cherry picking stats and stories to support a catastrophe narrative.

In terms of tracking all the chains, because of the dearth of testing in the beginning, I would suspect any shorter chains of transmission that didn't end in a super-spreader could easily be missed.

It is hard to get tested even now. It was essentially a catch-22. You could only become tested if you had contact with a proven case. But there were almost no proven cases, because you can only become a proven case if you had contact with a proven case.

It is very unlikely COVID-19. Stanford did a study and showed that the prevalence was very low in the early period even if you had respiratory symptoms and common viruses had been ruled out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824878

> I also went skiing in New Hampshire twice

You went skiing sick not once, but twice?

People do lots of stuff sick. That is why we have pandemics. Do airlines refund your ticket because you're feeling a little under the weather? Nope. So you infect the entire plane-load of people. Do bosses or customers like it when you're gone for two weeks because of a cold? Nope. So you go to work sick and a week later, everyone in your office is sick. The incentives are always aligned towards loading yourself up on cold medicine and going about your day. No company is willing to take the financial hit for public health.

If people disappeared into self-isolation whenever they had a sniffle, many diseases would be completely eradicated. They don't, so they aren't. (Yes, I know the flu can jump between humans and birds and back, so isolation wouldn't eradicate the flu. But a lot of other diseases would be completely gone.)

I don't think this is right. Getting sick significantly more or less can be a drawback at the individual level. Your hypothetical self-isolating people would be more sickly.

Most of the work humanity does against a given pathogen is in getting sick. We've recently automated that. But our immune systems are still out there fighting the good fight every cold/flu season.

The ideal season for an individual is one where you get exposed but don't develop symptoms, not one where you never get exposed. Not getting exposed is like missing a ski trip-- a terrible outcome to be avoided at all costs.

Usually symptoms linger long after you're contagious

At that point it was a cold.

My wife occasionally works in an emergency room, so the advice she gave me is the same advice that anyone else with the same symptoms would have from a doctor following the CDC's instructions.

She just thought it was a seasonal virus.

Edit: It wasn't until mid March that we (MA residents) suspected it was in the wild. Basically, there was a reported case that came through Logan airport in February, and then when it came out that the incubation period was 2 weeks and many cases just resembled a bad cold, everyone started to suspect that there were a lot of asymptomatic cases in the state that we didn't know about.

The CDC didn't see the first case of community transmission until Feb 28, a week after I got sick.

I had this too around the same timeframe. I have a condition which lets me "feel" ferritin spikes and it was the biggest one of my life. It took me 4 weeks too and then another 4 weeks to get over the ferritin feeling.

I dismissed it as the flu because of a runny nose (not a typical COVID symptom). But apparently a lot of flu patients have COVID because it's more contagious and why wouldn't they?

My plan is to continue self-isolating and try to nab one of the serological tests (if they ever do come out) which will tell you if you've had it.

How did you get rid of the excess ferretin? Just waiting it out?

I'm trying turmeric because something is making me not get rid of this thing and the excess ferretin it dumps in the blood seems plausible. I've had on/off fevers for weeks.

If you want to drop your ferritin levels, lower your iron (if that is safe for you). The body has no way of dropping iron levels apart from chelation. So, drinking/eating foods that act as natural chelators (ie. black tea) will help. Or, if you're feeling particularly generous, give blood.

(not a doctor, just someone who has hemochromatosis.)

The other reply nailed it. There is a sort of calcium "hack" your body has for binding to the iron. Try IP-6, colostrum or milk/dairy. At some point your body just stops being able to do it, though. IP-6 to me seems to work even past that point.

Past that, mitigating absorption with green tea seems to help a bunch. And avoiding breakfast cereals. And boxed pasta. I haven't tried turmeric. Despite hearing good things, it seems difficult to source. Everything else pales in comparison to phlebotomy. Of course, you can't donate if you've got on/off fevers.

Also there's some relationship between vitamin D and iron. I'm not clear enough on that to recommend it just for iron, but I will say I do supplement with it, especially through the darker parts of the year.

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