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Comment by asdf21 | Hacker News Reader

I'm calling it now, I bet many people (>20%) have had it, whether they realize it or not.

To be honest, I think it was all over the Bay Area in late December, Early January (when I'm pretty sure I had it) and Feb.

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Given that Wuhan did not even report its first case publicly until the 31st, this seems highly unlikely. Even if you believe China was 15-30 days behind in reporting (pushing it) and that somehow a near patient zero traveler from there ended up in the bay, having it spread to "all over the bay" levels by late December would be incredibly contagious. No timeline supports your claim here.

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline...

I thought the same thing until this afternoon.

In January I fell extremely ill, covid symptoms, including lower right lung pneumonia.

Today I tested negative for covid and antibodies. It seems to have been just a coincidence with a bad viral season.

Where were you able to test for antibodies and how accurate is this test? Asking since AFAIK, now widespread testing exists right now.

How do you explain the hospitalization rate not climbing until a couple months later?

There are 2 strains?

That would be a very obvious thing to detect (and we have not seen evidence of that).

evidence of what? two separate strains?

this paper mentions two strains[0], 'L' and 'S' type, was it refuted?

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwaa036...

yes: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/mutations-can-reveal...

Just read it and they were not disputing the existence of two strains but rather that the virus didnt jump from animals twice. The article disputes the claim that because L strain is 70% of the cases, that it must be more virulent.

the distinction is important here because this subthread started from the suggestion that there are multiple strains circulating, with different virulence. The fact there are multiple lineages is a natural consequence of how viruses spread

There's probably hundreds or even thousands of mutations of this coronavirus. It's kinda what it does. But they're basically meaningless, although it is useful for tracking how it spreads - kinda like a family tree.

See: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

There is pretty much no evidence of what common people would call "multiple strains" - as in, immunity doesn't transfer, different infection characteristics, etc.

The paper you posted was debunked pretty much instantly by people that know what they're talking about. There's a lot of junk papers out there written by people on coronavirus that aren't even in the field.

Evidence of one, less dangerous, strain, followed by a more dangerous strain that arrived months later. No such evidence exists.

So... you argue that 20% of the population had this disease, except that they didn't have this disease they had a close relative that is almost entirely asymptomatic in exactly the way you need it to be in order to explain away the case fatality rate measured for the disease we do know about?

I genuinely don't understand the desire on the part of so many people to... just not believe the relatively obvious (but still not remotely certain) fact that this is a very serious disease with an unmitigated doubling rate somewhere around 5 days and with somewhere in the realm of a 1% CFR. Really, the data matches that very well.

Certainly there is room for lots of uncertainty, but if your policy desires demand the invention of a second strain and whatnot... maybe it's time to revisit your priors?

https://www.google.com.hk/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/5080571...

There is strong evidence against that, based on retesting flu survey samples collected in Seattle in Jan/Feb 2020. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321

Well, that's a great thread, very informational and somewhat changed my opinion on this.

I basically figured since my symptoms aligned 100%, and also since I live and work near the largest casino in the Bay Area (which is a hub for tons of international travelers and people from SF Chinatown) that Corona was circulating around Wuhan in Nov, and made it to the Bay Area by December, and I caught it early Jan.

I still think that's a possibility, but it does seem like it would have made it to Seattle before mid-to-late February in that scenario.

Anyway, thx for the info.

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