A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions.

I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US. There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumonia" in November (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coro...).

My own story is this. My wife went with her team to a Chinese karaoke bar here in Seattle, in International District, in mid-November. Everyone fell very, very sick (one person has a lingering dry cough to this day). Fever for days on end, cough, etc. It seemed like the flu, except my wife and others claim it just felt different from other times they had the flu.

I caught it from my wife, and it did feel different. I'd never had a fever run for so long, and the way it progressed was just different. And the most unusual thing was that it seemed to affect my heart. I take a beta blocker to control frequent PVCs. But on the days immediately following "recovery" (by which I mean no more fever), I just couldn't move around too much or my heart would start throwing PVCs like crazy, as if I hadn't taken my meds. I was also feeling very weak and faint, which never happened to me before (I'm usually able to exercise just fine right after recovering from illness).

To add to the anecdote, our daughter caught it too but she just seemed to have a mild cold, which also matches the majority of infant COVID-19 cases.

I hope serological tests become widely available, since I'm really curious to know if I actually had it back then. Obviously in the mean time I'm not assuming I did, and I'm staying home and avoiding all human contact I can.

To explain the cavalier attitude expressed by people with symptoms: the “CES Flu” is a real thing. I’ve gone 11 years in a row now, and either me or my brother usually catches it every year. Something about thousands of international visitors in the same space, touching all the same things I guess.

Interestingly, I took a really proactive approach this year with liberal hand sanitizer usage and neither of us got sick!

Color me deeply skeptical. All the data we see out of "real" hotspots like New York seem to show a fairly clear progression on infection rate, days-to-show-symptoms, days-to-go-south, and days-to-die. If ConFlu was Covid, we would have seen a much more clear connection and growth. I would expect for Nevada to have been in a New York scenario.

I'm not saying this isn't COVID, it sounds like it might very well have been, but isn't "picking up the con crud" a stereotype of all conventions?

Isn't it considerably more likely that the flu they all had from CES was... well... the flu? Given January is the tail-end of flu season?

Retrospective antibody testing should be viewed carefully, given the relatively low specificity (i.e., high rate of false positives).

If there’s a high clinical suspicion (could be relevant in this case, though it may also represent the normal flu), the utility of the testing improves.

I went to CES this year, and a week and a half after (a typical incubation time for Covid-19) I started coming down with a strange lower respiratory illness that involved joint aches (my sacroiliac joint in particular, which I think I had stressed horribly the past year, suddenly became excruciatingly painful as I got sick to the point where I couldn't sleep), and intense on/off fevers/chills that lasted way longer than I am used to... and yet my cough was unproductive, I had no sinus or other involvement (which I always get), and I simply didn't have any other symptoms I am used to with a flu; it essentially seemed like "pneumonia maybe but with the wrong progression".

Regardless, I was knocked out for a while due to the fevers and lack of sleep. When I was just sort of getting better, I was visited by a coworker who, two weeks after he saw me for a day--and he notably spent most of that day with me, including multiple meals: we are two people at the top of a small company and I had been sick a while, so we had a lot to catch up on)--got sick with what we later determined was Covid-19 by positive test (but like, weeks later, at which point I hadn't been sick for a long long time, so there seemed no point in trying to use a viral test on me).

FWIW, we have good alternative explanations for where he got Covid-19, where I got sick with a shorter incubation time (involving me getting very little sleep while traveling to a handful of back-to-back events), and why I had joint pains (a particular series of flights and car trips that were similar to what I think first caused me issues a year ago... I didn't understand this until a month later, btw: I am changing my style and quantity of travel); but I really wish it were easy for me to quickly get an antibody test to see whether I have already had this (though that still won't ever tell me for sure as I could have had an asymptomatic case more recently... le sigh).

I know that "con flu" is mostly anecdotal, but a preponderance of evidence is still a preponderance of evidence, and quite litterally every person person I've known that regularly goes to conferences and conventions has not only heard of con flu, but has had it on more than one occasion. It's absolutely a thing.

I came back from CES to home in Eugene, OR, and fell ill. I missed 10 days of work. I am an anesthesiologist, and I knew that I have a viral illness (high fever, myalgias, SOB, etc). At the time I tested negative for influenza. Interestingly, I've been in a quarantine for a month. And I wore N95 for two weeks prior to the quarantine, because of my super paranoid wife. So if I can get tested for antibodies, it will be almost certainly CES, if I am positive.

This is a fascinating article. To retrospectively test attendees might shed a lot of light on the early spread.