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.