Comment by cblum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cblum | Hacker News Reader

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.

Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories...

I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she eventually recovered. The rest of our family had at least mild symptoms, and given how infectious it is - how would we not have gotten it given we did no distancing whatsoever.

The thing I am trying to wrap my mind around, is that if it was so prevalent before we knew about it - how did we not notices so many people dropping dead, etc? I have two thoughts that I would love to explore more.

1. We know about the placebo effect. Why would there not be a reverse placebo effect for this virus? If my wife had been seeing non stop covid news in February about how scary this disease is, why would she not start panicking, having more breathing problems, worse symptoms, and maybe even take a turn for the worse? If giving a sugar pill to someone and calling it medicine can improve outcomes - surely watching dire cable news about how people with your symptoms are dying left and right could do the opposite.

2. Maybe those of us who got it early were lucky, because they just weren't exposed over and over like people who finally got it in March/April.

If either or both of these things were true, then it could explain why/how the fatality rate rose dramatically in March/April, which would explain better how this could fly under the radar for so long, but be so prevalent.

And who knows - maybe someday I'll get a chance to take an antibody test and will find that I'm wrong and my family just got hit with a bad cold.

It's called the Nocebo effect [1]. It's discussed on Mind Field S2 E6 The Power of Suggestion.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

Going off a tangent here but just wanted to comment how powerful the nocebo effect can be.

I'm familiar with it in the context of strength sports, where "tweaking" your back, knees, etc. is relatively common.

If you tweak something and immediately go "oh no no no I'm gonna be out for weeks now", it does happen. The pain only seems to get worse for days, you can't move, if it's your lower back sometimes you can barely get out of bed.

When you learn to distinguish between "I'm hurt" (something felt a little funny and it hurt a bit, but you're still functional) vs "I'm injured" (something actually went really wrong, like a major muscle strain, or blunt trauma), and learn to keep a positive attitude in the face of pain, you're back in a couple days.

There's a group called Barbell Medicine that completely changed my mindset when it comes to nocebo. They teach people to accept pain is part of life, and to assess it instead of immediately worrying or panicking about it and going into what they call "movement avoidance".

Three reasons to why it may not have been "noticed":

1. Early on it had only spread in a small percentage of the populace so the absolute number of deaths was too low to be noticed.

2. The deaths from the regular flu this year were very low, see: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

3. The antibodies test out of Europe and NYC are pointing to an IFC around 0.35-0.6 which could "only" be 3-6x the bad 2017 flu season, note Covid19 is still the worse pandemic in decades.

I'm sorry, what is IFC?

Sorry IFR, infected fatality rate instead of case fatality rate (which is usually confirmed cases)

1. There's a Dr. House episode* about this phenomenon.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox6HWOjbDSI

> I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought.

Perhaps, but if it was, it was certainly happening at a significantly low rate, although that's probably how they all get started given that's it's expotential.

Since this has a higher fatality rate than traditional, common viruses I'd be most interested in the death rate of the population versus the normal average. Much like the NYTimes did for NYC[0], although much of data for 2019 seems to be absent unfortunately.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...

You can buy 'em now on Alibaba. Not FDA approved, Your Accuracy May Vary.

Why didn't all of you spread the disease to everyone else in the neighborhood?

Not trying to spread misinformation, since we know that one function of this coronavirus weakens your immune system as well as protective lining to the lungs for opportunistic additional viruses and bacteria to get you, then if those other viruses and bacteria never show up then more people would be fine.

No different than the "clinical latency" stage of HIV where nothing happens for a decade until your immune system weakens and then a benign opportunistic infection causes you problems. Here it just happens a lot faster - while this coronavirus is also executing other functions in multiple different organs.

This leads to the possibility that there are other seasonal but otherwise benign viruses and bacteria that are prevalent, while this coronavirus is also spreading.

Is that really as much of a farfetched idea if everyone has been looking a different direction? Just harder to resolve and an area to put some energy and research.

I stayed home the whole time. Was totally shot. And if they're right about COVID-19 spreading asymptomatically around 2 days before symptoms start, if my memory serves me right that would have coincided with the weekend for me.

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