Then again had some light respiratory stuff in early March. I live alone, isolation was already starting in some places, and I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere that WFH is easy.
I had plenty of "I might have already had it!" type conversations.
So I got my antibody test last week at my primary care physician. Negative. Was just a bad flu, I guess.
As someone who really hopes there will be a long-lasting immunity, I really, really hope you had a bad flu.
""" [Elitza Theel's] team has found that it's mostly the sickest patients — those who've been hospitalized — who produce IgG antibodies. And it appears that a small percentage of patients with milder cases of the disease aren't making the robust IgG antibodies.
"This is very preliminary," Theel warned. "But there might be a differential immune response between very sick individuals and individuals who have a more mild course of disease." """
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/antibody-tests-ca...
Their definition of "mild" means that you didn't require hospital care. So if you're under ~30 and otherwise healthy, you may be one of the people who beat the infection by some other mechanism. Or you just had influenza. It's impossible to know for sure right now.
- response to a power tool injury
When my doctor arrived, he was all cool. Then he asked me a bunch of questions and went to see the x-ray and blood work result in the labs. After taking some time, when he came back, he had a face mask and a can of Lysol. He said he had been delayed filling an epidemiological report.
That's the moment when I knew it was bad haha.
One of the techniques of trying to make vaccines is to attenuate it by exposing to to different hosts; so that it will mutate into a form that's less harmful to humans; kinda the opposite of what probably happened here, where a virus that was not deadly to either bats or pangolins but caused havoc when it got to us.
Which makes this one bad as it's infectious for a long time before there are symptoms or it kills the host - hence the panic.
Coincidentally, I got sick after several of my coworkers/close friends returned from trips to China.
Then a month later, after my roommate returned from a trip to Vancouver, BC, we both became ill. This time it lasted about a week.
Next, about a month and a half later I was feeling unwell for weeks with very different symptoms. I went to urgent care. This turned out to be an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis, and I was diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes.
No clue if it was COVID-19, but it was strange. And we're ground zero for it (I work in Manhattan and used to commute every day on public transit).
or another seasonal infection that is normally benign is going around.
Sars-Cov-2 debilitates linings of the lungs and other organs and the immune system and blood cell oxygen transport efficiency all at once
But if nothing takes advantage of that then nothing happens, and you heal before something does happen.
With HIV we studied it in reverse: we saw people were dying of benign illnesses and then discovered they had been infected with this other virus for a decade. This first exposure to HIV presents itself as a flu/fever until it is sufficiently surpressed by the immune system and takes a decade of iterative mutations to bypass the immune system.
With COVID19 a similar result happens within a week, but we aren't really looking at which bacteria or viruses could have been benign that may also be present.
Not that complicated, just no bandwidth to figure it out yet.
But if you follow this rabbit hole, it could easily suggest that in late fall 2019 there were just few people that had Sars-Cov-2 and they either statistically were not getting exposed to the opportunistic infections, or a seasonal benign opportunistic infection was not running in conjunction that season.
This notion has been vehemently rejected by people over the past month, but it looks like people might be a little more open to it. Maybe the right people will begin to entertain the hypothesis.
There were a spike in bacterial pneumonia cases in regional Australian hospitals in the middle of summer prior to the known outbreak. I know of 1/2 dozen people (including myself) who caught some highly contagious non-flu virus and had varying symptoms. One person developed pneumonia but tested negative for both the flu and SARS-CoV-2 at the time - which was how I heard about the spike in hospitalisations.
My pet theory is that someone infected with the milder version was co-infected with the bat originated virus in Wuhan resulting in a highly contagious version that can cause COVID-19.
Whether they worked in the lab or got it from the market is a matter of debate. I'm thinking lab as the market didn't have bats and patient zero didn't go to the market, while the lab did have bats at some point. There was a serious effort to hide the evidence which makes it all the more suspicious.
There was evidence of a human-specific immune response mutation which could indicate it was neither manufactured or required an intermediary host.
What I think we have to be careful of is that the milder version doesn't provide immunity for the more dangerous one.
A lot of people in this thread an to be clutching at the assumption it couldn't possibly have been anywhere else before it was detected. One case in France not spreading is fairly lucky if it's true.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
Ball is in your court. Keen to hear a response.
October 2019 is even earlier than the earliest known cases.