Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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