NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S. | Hacker News Reader

NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.

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So many people, even here, read the article and are like "I knew I had covid that December, I had the weirdest cold".

But actually this should make you suspicious of such anecdotes.

There's just much too many of them for them all to be covid.

So they really count as evidence that people just get weird colds and flus.

And hence that the weird cold you had in November 2019 was just a weird non-covid cold.

Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?

When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.

While I agree with the general point you and the op are making, I don’t think your specific assertion is correct. Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion; some people infect large numbers of other people, but most infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the people with these anecdotes didn’t infect anyone they know of is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I do think you’re correct that they didn’t have it).

I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might provide antibodies for some. We’ve seen that happen multiple times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin stories.

We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main outbreak.

There have been many variants that emerged in the US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think perhaps the impression that there haven't been any variants stems from the fact that none of the big variants of concern have been from the US, which appears to have just been luck.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-varian...

> I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February.

This is from late last year, an article that attempted to group the mutations into "L", "G", "S", "O", etc, strains: https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yx...

You can see where it compares infections to proportion of strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7 countries listed here, but I think I remember a different article that had more, and the pattern was pretty consistent.

First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but being it was the first time in years I had been sick I decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for the anti-bodies.

>why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?

This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically the news alone could be responsible for increased stress, much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data available regarding certain bio markers like increased cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases before the media reporting).

But let’s say for example where media ( I suppose backed by statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.

Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24 thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass outbreak.

Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these superspreaders.

This is why Italy got absolutely hammered quite early on. They were very unlucky to get hit by the mother of all super spreader events.

Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France had a few cases before then, but it died out.

I just think most people haven't actually had a bad case of the flu or a respiratory illness before. So people who did around November/December assume it must have been covid, when they most likely just caught something that people usually catch around that time of year.

I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it feels like to be very ill.

If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.

Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39 years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year, but the flu only once in my entire life.

Influenza is rare? Maybe rare for you if you habitually get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very common, most people have experienced it.

This is correct.

Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038

on average, about 8% of the U.S. population gets sick from flu each season, with a range of between 3% and 11%, depending on the season.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

Flu is kinda like COVID: a significant percentage of infections are without symptoms.

Lots of estimates, I usually see it as around one-third of cases having no symptoms: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646474/

I’ll take a slight leap and guesstimate this means a lot of flu infections are around the symptom level of a mild or bad cold as well.

When you know you have the flu, it’s probably the flu, but it’s much harder to self-determine that you don’t have the flu.

I read once that many cases of the flu are really food poisoning. I got H1N1 and felt like I was dying for a week. Looking back I now think it's the only time I've ever really had the flu.

Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038

The CDC estimates around 30 million symptomatic influenza infections in a year; in recent years, more[1].

And roughly three-quarter of infections are asymptomatic[2], so ~120 million total cases annually.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221326001...

Correct. I'm 36 and unless it was mild or asymptomatic, I'm sure I've never had influenza.

When people exaggerate a common cold into "the flu" I respond with equal exaggeration by insisting I take them to the hospital.

Influenza can be mild, even asymptomatic, so unless you are really able to test; you probably don't have good numbers for how often you've caught the flu.

> That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.

Yeah, this is 100 percent not the reason people think covid isn’t real.

There are a myriad of reasons why people think covid isn't real. But for the segment of that population who think it isn't real when they are dying of it, the perceived severity of their experienced symptoms is a big part of it.

Im in my late 30s and I have never had the flu. Ive had multiple terrible colds, but no flu.

The flus not hard to avoid, and might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

EDIT: i dont take the flu vaccine

> [Influenza] might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Ive had multiple terrible colds, but no flu.

How do you tell the difference between a terrible cold and flu? Doctors can't tell the difference from symptoms alone, do you have yourself tested each time you have a cold?

might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

That's not likely, and with fewer people exposed to the flu and gaining natural immunity, there may even be a big spike in flu cases if social distancing and mask wearing are relaxed next flu season.

I guess that's a good point, but I think of the flu as different symptoms, you are really fatigued, you have brain fog, feel a bit like you are at the brink of death, have headaches, and you're caughing, maybe with a sore throat and more difficulty breathing.

Whereas colds are more congestion with drowsiness.

But you're totally right, symptoms alone are hard to use for accurately knowing what you had, there are so many types of cold virus and bacteria out there too.

I guess for me, I had never had the symptoms I describe in the former, until a few years ago I did, which I thought of as getting the flu. Had it been early 2020, I might have wondered if it was Covid, given the description of symptoms.

> might have gone extinct with the lockdowns

This is unlikely as humans aren’t the only hosts for influenza. Almost all can infect birds and most can infect pigs. Probably some other humans too. And jump between eachother and humans.

We might have the same issue with COVID: vaccinating all humans may not eradicate it if some animals serve as natural reservoirs (mink maybe? Ferrets?).

Perhaps horseshoe bats and/or pangolins may be animal reservoirs as well.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

While you can’t perfectly reliably, a fever is a pretty good indicator; anything beyond a mild fever is very unusual for the cold, but standard for flu.

A high fever.

The difference is quite significant and a doctor should know the difference.

I was 40 the first (and only) time I caught flu. I went to the doctor. I don't go to the doctor for a bad cold.

Maybe there are light flus. I don't know - but I don't want the real thing again.

while high fever and other symptoms is a rule of thumb, there's still enough overlap between flu and cold symptoms (especially a mild flu vs a bad cold) that your doctor is not going to tell you you have one or the other without doing a flu test.

With Flu your bones or muscles ache or your belly feels like it falls off. When bad, you have all symptoms. Worse is when attracting lung inflammation, that feels as if you are constantly drowning. All of this with high fever or even worse, cold fever.

Those symptoms may or may not occur depending on the influenza strain and the individual patient. Many influenza cases are entirely asymptomatic.

Flus and colds have significant differences.

If you develop symptoms abruptly and you have a fever and/or body aches it's almost certainly the flu.

Unfortunately, flu has animal reservoirs; it’s going nowhere permanently.

It took 31 years before I ever caught the real flu (influenza), and not just a cold or stomach flu. And most people in my family or my friends have never had it.

Your friends and family might never have had serious influenza symptoms. But asymptomatic infections are very common so it's likely that some of them have at least been infected.

I can believe that, could be for me as well I guess, maybe that was just my first time having strong symptoms.

It would be interesting to see how many of those who thought they had it prior to Feb/March 2020 ended up getting Covid later, as it would mostly rule those anecdotes out.

It's kinda too late now though, since most of those people are vaccinated now so they'll have antibodies already, right?

My understanding is that the vaccine will create antibodies for the spike protein (since that's been the thing the vaccines reproduce to train the immune system on) but not the nucleocapsid protein. https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/covid-19...

I was one of those "I got something weird in late Feb 2020, maybe it was an early Covid case!" people, so I got an antibody test in April or May of last year, when they became easy to get. Nothing - so yeah, must've just been a weird cold of some sort. It was strange since it didn't have the runny nose or head congestion, but was predominantly breathing/cough related.

There was definitely something going around late 2019/early 2020. I had it, and so did many people I know.

But it's very unlikely it was Covid, because Covid is much more infectious and more deadly than both colds and flu.

People weren't masking or taking any precautions then, so Covid would have spread very quickly indeed. And that would have created an obvious medical emergency, with hospitals at full capacity and a clear peak in unexpected deaths.

Relatively minor symptoms, no huge increase in hospitalisations, and no huge peak in deaths all suggest Covid wasn't the culprit.

There's a lot of confirmation bias in this thread for sure.

I thought I had COVID around February/March 2020. Roughly a year ago antibody tests became readily available, so I got one, and it came back negative. There was a strain of the flu going around during the winter of 2019-2020 that was not protected against by the flu vaccine, that I suspect is contributing to a lot of the confirmation bias (and I'm guessing is what I had at the time).

I'm honestly surprised there's so many people in this thread who think they had COVID but never got the antibody test. They're cheap and quick, and if you could have confirmed you had COVID antibodies, at least for me that would have been a huge stress reliever during the last 12-18 months of pandemic lockdowns.

I was pretty sure I had COVID in November '20. Everyone else in my household had it, and we didn't isolate from each other really stringently. I had a mild sore throat for a couple of days. Never got tested because I was "quarantined" anyway for the close contacts.

Finally I went and got a COVID antibody test to satisfy my curiosity, which was negative on all factors.

I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation if I was infected. Seems to me it would not, but that's not based on any really informed judgment.

People still have antibodies from 2003 SARS infections, I don't think you've had COVID.

antibody tests are really hard. his could be a false negative. further, he could have had it, but without antibodies. or he might have had something else.

If he didn’t have antibodies then how did he ever recover? Surely the thing doesn’t just burn itself out. Without anything to fight it, won’t it just continually infect him?

some people are recovering through other responses, including t-cell response, etc. I don't have the academic experience, the clinic experience, or his specific medical history, so I can't speak specifically. I do recall lots of papers at the beginning of Covid talking about high t-cell responses in patients without a lingering anti-body response. That all could have been early science based on poor data as well though.

Based on the information provided it seems highly unlikely the OP had covid.

It isn't impossible but the lack of antibodies is just one further data point. Most people who recover have positive antibody tests.

There are two basic immune systems: innate and adaptive. In some cases the innate immune system clears the infection before the adaptive immune system produces detectible levels of antibodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system?wprov=sfl...

Sorry, I'm aware of that in general. I was wondering in this case. I suppose that's possible for people who don't fall sick (I assume that's why low viral load means you can get exposed and not get sick?) but OP was quite sick.

I think it’s unlikely that’s it for someone seriously ill for an extended period.

>antibody tests are really hard.

Are you referring to the quantitative side? You can simply buy the antibody standard and sVNT test kit from Genscript. You can get a 96 test kit for under $3k. We have it and it works quite well.

the general concept of antibody tests. Antibodies have serious dilution. Detection is a challenging problem. Many antibody tests (ex. measles) has a pretty high (in my unqualified opinion) false negative rate. Its a tough problem to solve in general.

a single paper discussing false reports - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14574997/

Well, let me first state the obvious - no test anywhere is perfect. But when it comes to antibody tests you have to be a bit more specific and discuss the underlying technology and method of detection. For e.g. there are 1129 diagnostic products for covid, and not all of them are identical. There are many reasons for false-negatives and some could be specific to the product being used. The paper you linked to is not about COVID19, its from 2003 and also its scope is not a general review of antibody tests. Its an investigation into false-positives with a specific underlying autoimmune disease possibly masking the result. I am not familiar with this study to speak in any great detail.

https://www.finddx.org/covid-19/pipeline/

I was in a study. My IgG titer went up to 960, when I gave plasma twice, then 7-8 months after the infection it was below the 80 threshold to be considered positive. The weird thing was that six months in, I got tested for IgM and I was positive for that as well, which might been a sign of a second exposure. I know others in the same study who were negative a few weeks after being positive. So it might depend on the person and the test.

> I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation if I was infected.

First, there's no scientific basis for doing so. Unless your diet is deficient of zinc or you're spending months in an overcast winter environment neither is going to do anything for you. They certainly won't have any impact on antibody formation.

42% of the US population has a vitamin D deficiency [0]. In the HN population, that number might even be higher (extrapolating my experience with tech workers and the hours they spend outside).

I would encourage most people here to have their Vitamin D levels checked and take supplements, especially in the winter months.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/

Most doctors I’ve met agreed with this.

Also certain diets could have other deficiencies, like in my case I almost never eat fish so I add omega3 (DHA).

I agree, if it's likely your deficient you should get tested and supplement as necessary. That's my point. It should be done as part of evidence based medicine and not a random thing you decide to do with no supporting evidence.

Ideally everyone should get periodic vitamin D level tests, and then adjust their diet, sun exposure, and supplementation accordingly. But unfortunately it's just not practical to test everyone. And also we know that a large fraction of the population is deficient, and that moderate supplement doses are generally safe. So routine supplementation is justified for most of us on an evidence based medicine basis.

There is some limited in vitro evidence for zinc as a treatment.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

The evidence for vitamin D is much stronger including multiple randomized controlled trials.

https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/

“ there's no scientific basis”

Theres no scientific basis for anything until a proper study is done. Doesn't mean it isn't true. And consider that estimates are as high as 50% of scientific papers’ results are false (especially in bio).

N.B.1: I'm a scientist in a government lab

N.B. 2: I’m not impugning science, just fellow scientists.

> And consider that estimates are as high as 50% of scientific papers’ results are false (especially in bio).

Source?

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Where is the 50% number? Or are you linking to a random paper? (i.e. not the source for the claim)

Did you even read the paper? "Most" is >50%.

Nope. You don't invent numbers like that. A claim that includes a specific number needs an actual citation which includes the number.

"Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields" is a ridiculous claim. I don't know a single scientist who believes that. How many scientists have you spoken to in the bio field?

Do you have a substantiave criticism of the paper that I linked?

What's your point? When you make a medical decision it should be based on the best research done to date. Just because existing research doesn't mean something isn't true isn't a reason to do it.

I have seen scientific evidence that Vit D supplimenting helps. In Spain its prescribed if you get covid. re: "unless you are deficient": you supliment to ensure you arent deficient, you are foolish to risk zinc or Vit D deficiency if you know you have covid. If you plan a fews days in bed you are (usually) not going to get much sun. It's foolish to risk deficiency of any vitamin while ill.

> First, there's no scientific basis for doing so.

"No scientific basis" doesn't necessarily mean "false", otherwise you create a world where everything not mandatory is forbidden. Many doctors do exist in this world; they're always totally confident even when they're wrong, and they will tell you to not do things unless it's the specific thing they want you to do.

"No scientific basis" means you look at the best scientific evidence we have today and make informed decisions based on it. You don't make stuff up with the hope that it's helpful.

>you're spending months in an overcast winter environment

I'd imagine this would include ~30-40% of Americans.

The antibody tests do occasionally come up negative for patients who had confirmed infections. You might want to get the Adaptive Biotechnologies T-Detect COVID test which assays memory T cells.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...

I’m actually surprised that I don’t hear more “I thought I had COVID in 2019, took an antibody test, and was right” anecdotes. Especially if the false positive rate on these tests is significant.

A colleague and his wife became 'sicker than we've ever been' in late December, 2019, within a week of him transiting in the business lounge in Vancouver airport, on his way to San Jose. He notes that a passenger flight from Wuhan landed in Vancouver at the same time and transit passengers from that flight enjoyed the same buffet.

His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.

"Sicker than you've ever been" isn't a medical diagnosis.

I got absolutely royally fucked up by influenza and "sicker than I've ever been in my adult life" -- and I'm 49 -- but it was Jan 2019 not Dec 2019, so I'm pretty certain it wasn't COVID.

Probably 5% of the population every winter gets "sicker than they've ever been in their adult life" with some horrible influenza/bronchitis/pneumonia.

If everyone who got "sicker than they've ever been" in Dec 2019 were actually sick with COVID then January would have decimated long term care facilities around the United States. Instead you can't see any upward trend in excess mortality in Jan. If anything Jan and Feb were slightly low and the trend doesn't become apparent until late March.

So in my case, I was tested for influenza, got negative, and they told me it was a virus ...that they didn't know what it was.

My guess is now they know what it was.

The false negative rate of the rapid influenza test is around 50%. It can tell you that you have influenza but it can't tell you that you don't have it.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_gu...

There's also a lot of other cold and flu viruses other than influenza, and just a normal rhinhovirus cold virus can cause bronchitis or pneumonia.

And the additional note would be that later, when I had extensive direct contact with someone COVID positive, I had minor symptoms lasting two or three days. Which at least somewhat suggests I had an immune response of someone who had it.

No it doesn't. Most COVID infections are mild. And someone who recovers from actual COVID should have had mucosal neutralizing antibodies in your upper respiratory tract and neutralizing antibodies in your blood, so you shouldn't have had any symptoms at all.

If you had extensive direct contact with someone COVID positive and didn't take precautions then you just got kind of lucky. You weren't immune.

...And a year into being told it wasn't possible I had it then, there's test results saying it was found that early in my state.

Which is why talking in absolutes makes you sound less credible, not more.

Those aren't your test results. That was someone else.

They’ve found extremely low numbers of possible cases in your state. The numbers found are very close to the expected false positive rate.

Meanwhile there was also an unusually bad flu going around at the same time affecting a high single digit percentage of the population. So ok it’s not impossible you caught COVID. There is a small but real chance, but it’s probably tens or even hundreds of thousands to one against.

Worth noting that the influenza test is only for certain strains. You tested negative for specific strains, presumably with a rapid test that also has very high false negative rates.

I got the sickest I have been in years in December 2019. I had a cough for about 6 months afterwards that was sufficiently bad that I had a chest x-ray to rule out lung cancer. My partner got sick shortly after I did with similar symptoms.

I suspect it was the flu though. My desk neighbour at work was hospitalised for the flu (tested and confirmed) a week earlier. I had been vaccinated, but it's mayve the case I had a more mild case than he did thanks to the vaccination.

That being said, my partner is a nurse and was the only person in her department not to get covid. WE did get tested for covid antibodies in late 2020 and didn't have any, but it's possible they had diminished by then if it really was covid.

But the simplest explanation is still that it was just the flu.

I was at a party during the COVID-19 crisis and felt “sicker than I’ve ever been”. Got tests after I’d isolated. No antibodies. God damn it. Imagine getting that sick with a cold and then it not even giving you immunity to anything worthwhile.

Well you probably now have some level of immunity to that particular cold virus. So you're much less likely to have type of cold again. There are dozens of different viruses that can cause common cold symptoms.

As someone who returned from Shanghai in mid-November with a light cough that worsened into a diagnosed "upper-respiratory viral infection" for ~3 weeks of misery on the couch... I wish I could confirm one way or the other!

You almost certainly didn't have it.

In mid-November there could have only been cryptic spread around Wuhan. That means that maybe at the outside 3,000 people around Wuhan had the virus at that point (which I'm likely being generous with that number). Your chances of having contracted it in Shanghai is low. 3,000 people sounds like a lot but China has a population of 1.4 billion people. Your odds are 1-in-500,000 -- and they're much lower given the geographical separation from Wuhan to Shanghai.

You had a cold which developed into bronchitis.

Now if you told me it was mid-January and that you lost your sense of smell so completely that you couldn't smell food burning on the stove and when it came back meat taste rancid, I'd agree you probably had it.

There is various evidence kicking around of cases in Wuhan back as far as September, so it's not entirely out of the frame.

No it pretty much is out of the frame.

I'm allowing for 3,000 active cases in mid-November in Wuhan. It is expected that "patient zero" was closer to September, and I'm aware of the evidence from WHO and the genetic "dating" that leads to September/October timeframes for when it emerged.

That still doesn't get it all over Shanghai by mid-November.

And if there were more than 3,000 cases in mid-November the problem with the way the virus doubles every 3 days and kills about 1% (particularly before we knew anything about it) is that if you increase that number then you wind up with bodies stacking up way too high.

And now if you assume that there was more than cryptic spread in literally a handful of people in Shanghai in mid-November then by mid-January it would have been slaughtering people in Shanghai in a way that couldn't have been hidden, and Shanghai would have looked like Wuhan wound up looking.

And taking 3,000 active cases in Wuhan in mid-November you get 3,000,000 cases in mid-December after exponential growth, which is 35% of the population which is way over the 7% seroprevalence in April 2020.

Once this virus really gets going it doesn't hide. It can only be around in a population for about 2 months before the bodies really stack up and you cannot miss it (it was probably around Wuhan a bit longer than 2 months without detection because the progenitor virus strain was less well adapted).

I appreciate the response and some of the numbers. That makes sense, and to back up your theory I can confirm that nobody around me got sick that I knew of. We did travel from Beijing but I don't think that's relevant given the rest of the post.

I think you can take an antibody test, if you had Covid (and assuming you didn't get the Covid vaccine or real Covid later), you should show signs of antibodies.

Yes but even assuming he tests positive for antibodies , it is way more likely that it would be due to a more recent but completely asymptomatic infection rather than due to a very very early infection when the only few cases we know weren't even in the same region.

Yeah. Also, I've heard multiple anecdotes of people who had some nasty infection that winter and did get an antibody test that came back negative. Something else was going around.

Influenza was bad. My father in law had a bad case in February 2020, lab verified, and gave it to us. Even with the flu vaccine it was notably worse than anything we had with a kid in daycare.

True, but at least if they test negative they know for sure it was something else.

The CDC’s Dr. Thornburg and Josh Denny, chief executive of the NIH’s All of Us program and an author of the latest study, both said they don’t plan to search blood samples earlier than December 2019, given how few they have found back then. “We’ve seen a very low rate of positivity in this time period,” [1]

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi...

Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.

> Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.

Because if people found out that Covid had been spreading in the US for months before the “official” starting date of March 2020, they’d come to realize that they would have never even realized there was a pandemic going on were it not for the media attention.

The lack of ICU beds might have been a clue...

Yeah. My problem is that my "really bad cold that lingered" was in February 2020.

That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say.

I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been struggling more with concentration issues and depression since then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation in the US, etc.

The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.

>The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.

I had a viral illness back in July with symptoms that couldn't rule out Covid-19. I went to get tested the very next day as soon as I possibly could have and quarantined while I waited. At the time I got tested I was told the backlog was on the order of 3-5 days for Quest. I ended quarantine 2 weeks later, not because I got test results back, but because they waited so long that even if it came back positive I already met the CDC guidelines to end quarantine regardless. Rather than processing the tests they could manage in a timely fashion they were wasting tests on samples so old it didn't even matter what the result was.

Rather than a priority queue they should have been handling tests like a priority stack. I'm sure it would suck to be told "sorry we're not going to check your sample, assume it's positive" but at least then you could manage quarantine and contact tracing in a timely manner instead of waiting so long it's basically useless. Not to mention the government no doubt paid Quest for all of those useless tests vs. Quest only getting paid for the amount they could do in a timely manner. Doing it a reasonable way would just be throwing money away for them.

I didn't have any particularly weird colds, but I had a fever far too many times between late 2019 and early 2020

i had a weird flu in april 2020, right as the covid panic really began in my region. knocked me out for 2 weeks, i lost almost 10kg, sickest i've been in a long time. ticked off every box on the list of covid symptoms.

but the PCR test said it wasn't covid, and it can't have been all that contagious because neither of my roommates got sick. so yeah, sometimes people just get sick.

My anecdote... I thought I might have got it in Jan 2020. Keep in mind I frequent a fast food place that is across the nursing home that had one of usa's first deaths, at about the same time. It definitely felt different than other times I got the flu. And then about six months later I actually got covid. Will the only difference in symptoms was I was very sore with covid. And it took at least a month to recover.

"I got super sick during flu season, it must have been covid!"

Or, you know, the most obvious thing. You had the flu, during flu season.

The possibility of having contracted it crossed my mind since I had a bad "cold" on January 2020. But a year later I got an antibody test that showed no prior infection.

Like the nice song from They Bay be Giants "Put it to the test" says:

A fact is just a fantasy Unless it can be checked

It's interesting that this is a popular enough sentiment to be a pattern.

Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february, early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait.

We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative.

So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.

There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the people involved took a rational/science minded approach and bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for others.

>So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug?

I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.

> I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is.

Holy hell this.

I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like a bad flu."

I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind.

Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would teach them.

From a symptoms and virology standpoint, COVID-19 is closer to being like a really really bad cold. Several of the people I know who had it literally used those words to describe their experience. Several other endemic human coronaviruses also cause colds.

But surely, the hundreds of thousands of dead in the US alone, millions worldwide, would suggest that while for many people it is a really really bad cold, for others it is far worse than the flu?

You're missing the point. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is almost completely different from the influenza virus. It's structurally much closer to at least some cold viruses. In particular it's very similar to HCoV-OC43 which causes colds and frequently kills patients who are in poor health to start with.

This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.

> I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone.

This is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about influenza statistics, btw. That "tens of thousands" number is an estimate; confirmed annual influenza deaths are much lower, from 3,448 to 15,620 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...).

I had a coworker who got really sick around the same time. He had the PCR test done and it came back negative. There was definitely a bad flu going around at the same time as covid was popping up in the US.

I could see that. I got absolutely wrecked around the end of February, in part because I got badly chilled one night and allowed it to persist (not wanting to go make a fire in the woodstove when it was already nighttime). I ran a high fever for days and was totally wiped out, and have always wondered if it was COVID.

Ended up just getting vaccinated, now I'll never know. For what it's worth, the second Moderna dose clobbered me like it was supposed to, so maybe it was busy making antibodies and I didn't actually get any immunity from February 2020…

Same happened to me, was in public a lot that February, got a terrible flu that laid me up. Got tested twice (two different antibodies tests) a few months later and both negative.

Just a bad coincidence but I suppose I could count myself lucky.

This was my experience as well. In SF and got symptoms mid Feb, doctor visit two weeks later concluded pneumonia and gave me antibiotics, no covid tests available, took 2+ months to recover. Later got Abbott Architect antibody test and it was negative, but I'm skeptical of the result.

What is Abbott's false negative rate again? Im remembering initially it was sort of high, but I don't recall offhand.

> Dr. Francis Collins, director for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said the Abbott ID Now machine, which is used to perform rapid coronavirus tests, has “about a 15% false negative rate.”

https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/us-coronavirus-update-0... (May 2020)

EDIT: The above is just one of the search results I found. There may be more recent (and more accurate) data.

Its interesting to me how so many people got a flu during flu season but they all are convinced they had covid. Good for you for at least getting an antibody test.

It's also interesting that this year the flu has disappeared ( zero if I heard it right)in some places) because according to the medical lords the mask wearing has had an effect. It's all a modern day version of religion.

Exactly same experience for me. precisely in late feb, early march. I could have written this comment without change a word.

And yet I know reverse story: a friend of the family had strange "flu" in February 2020, later tests showed antibodies. Granted it was in Seattle.

If you're reading this article and live in the US, you should really consider enrolling in the All of Us research study: https://www.joinallofus.org

It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many many others :)

From the linked article: "Of the 24,079 study participants with blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi."

So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or had the virus at that point.

That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been spreading for a while.)

> Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not)

That assumption is, uhm, doing a lot of work there

Yeah, this is selecting for people participating in a medical study, it is far from a random sampling.

Lots of very rural America would be ruled out, even if the study participants weren't all from traditional big cities.

People that are less mobile also wouldn't participate, etc. Lots of people who wouldn't contract COVID early would also not be likely to participate in this kind of trial.

Plus the positives in this case weren't all in January, they spread into March (by which point in time finding positives becomes much more likely).

And that's aside from the difficulties with antibody testing and cross-reactivity -- although this study looks a lot better than the previous one.

> Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not)

I can't think of anything more anti-science than dismissing data.

how is he dismissing data? questionable data should be treated as such... why would a linear extrapolation be a good fit here?

I think they are implying that blood sampling is not a random sample of people (more likely to be from someone who is sick), not that it is inaccurate.

I don't think the phrase you quote is intended as a dismissal of the data. It comes across as an acknowledgement of the data's limitations, and a caution about what kind of conclusions can be drawn. During my statistics course in college, one of the first sections of the course covered sampling, and the various ways sampling can be done badly, thereby biasing the sample, and thereby leading to conclusions about the sampled population that don't reflect the reality of that population.

Cautioning against that failure mode strikes me as intellectually honest, not anti-science.

Having worked with banked blood sample data before for influenza research, it's very, very much not representative.

I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was hard to clear the congestion.

It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time.

It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again.

We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.

Have any of you get tested for antibodies?

I never did, i don't think any of us did. One of us ended up in close proximity however to someone who'd tested positive for covid, just prior to getting the results of their tests. This person did not get sick.

That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing should be made of it unless that person were to ever be tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still can't draw any conclusions from it.

Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020, just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not because I thought I already had it, but mostly because there's no point in worrying about something I can't change. If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened.

I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having been following the rules fairly stringently would unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where I could be exposed for no real reason.

The chances are really low that it was covid. A lot of colds go around and many last a long time. Millions of Americans had a cold in December 2019. A handful likely had COVID-19. You are probably in the former camp.

There was a nasty flu going around that winter. I got it in October/November and it very nearly hospitalized me. I was down for two solid weeks.

It was too early for C19, but it was brutal nonetheless.

My sister got it and had to skip Christmas. Tested positive for influenza.

Yeah, my son got pneumonia in late 2019. Tested negative for previous COVID exposure over the summer of 2020; we certainly wondered prior to that.

I got a bad flu in early December 2019. Fever, vomiting, cramping. It does indeed seem like colds and flus have gotten considerably more nasty in the last decade.

You are also a decade older with a less robust immune system. That's why these statements are hard to qualify, too many latent variables.

> There was a nasty flu going around that winter.

Yes, it was a bad flu season, with possibly more than one of the bad cold or flu in the winter of 2019-2020. I was ill 3 times in the last 3 months of 2019. On the last one I went to a doctor who basically said "there's a lot of it about".

Also, the last cold that I had, was in February 2020.

I agree, that's why I've never really considered it was covid. It was just coincidental timing and strange symptoms. It wouldn't be my first 'weird cold'. I haven't even really thought about it much until I seen the comment thread here. Seeing other people's stories reminded me of it. It was just more of an anecdote to add than anything.

Sounds like a weird cold. There just wasn't very much COVID around back then.

I had almost the exact same experience in late Jan [edit: 2020], along with most of my coworkers. I did keep wondering if I had Covid so I got tested, but with a negative result. The main piece of evidence that speaks against the Covid theory is any kind of mortality deviation, which didn't occur until later half of March.

Anecdotally, over time I heard many other locales, workspaces and schools experienced a similar "weird cold." It may not have been Covid but there was certainly a very widespread, and very unusual cold in the winter of 2019-2020.

You had the same experience in late Jan of 2020 or 2021?

Edited-in the year, apologies. It was Jan 2020.

Ahh thank you! I am guessing you are outside of the USA. Our testing pipeline was basically a shit show until the end of March 2020 [1]. The first CDC kits (The only tests authorized) didn't start shipping out until the start of Feb, and they were later determined to be faulty!

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/18/tim...

No, not at all - I am in MA. Note I did not get tested immediately, I merely wondered about those winter colds so many of us experienced until the testing became more available. Then around June I got an antibody test at an urgent care clinic to put the question to rest.

Mind you the test could have still been faulty, but the mortality data ultimately does not show any anomalies in that time frame and that's a lot harder to explain under the hypothesis that it was C19.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_United_State...

says "The unusually abrupt decline in cases by April 2020 was attributed to the effects of widespread social distancing and lockdowns aimed at COVID-19"

Is there any possibility that the cases are counted in COVID-19 after April 2020 ?

I've heard stories like this from a lot of people in Dec/Jan/Feb. Many of them carried on in the months that followed as if they were already in possession of antibodies, believing that they "already had covid".

As others have pointed out, there are lots of cold-and-flu style illnesses endemic in the human population. There are antibody tests that can tell you reasonably authoritatively, if you're actually curious.

Did you have side effects after your first covid vaccine? Apparently that's more likely if you've already had covid.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25066791...

Some of the schools around me closed for a day in late January 2020 to clean due to an influenza outbreak. I thought it was strange at the time since there was no evident increase in illness among adults I know. I figure it was a bad strain that had been lying dormant for a while, so kids had no immunity to it. It was very specifically stated at the time to be influenza, as opposed to just higher-than-normal absences due to non-specific diseases. I think the absence rate was something like 30%.

There are many, many different viruses that cause ‘the flu’ and the symptoms can vary quite a bit between varieties.

Cold with secondary bacterial infection? Or just a bad cold, potentially; there’s a lot of variation.

I think this is a good argument for the government to start a program to do an ongoing “serological census”.

On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If there’s ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of, this would give us the data before we’re even aware of its existence.

That feels like a wonderfully efficient way to generate a continuously fertile crop of new conspiracy theories.

Here's a simple one: do we really trust a government agency (or hell, anyone really) to collect intimate and identifiable data about our bodies all while preserving anonymity and securing the data from nation state attackers? Do we trust nameless data scientists to run SQL queries over us that aren't intended to determine which ones of us will be smarter, stronger, more violent, etc? Do we trust politicians that have not yet been elected to office to use this data for benevolent purposes like our current politicians would (if we trust our current politicians)?

Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester inside of concerned populations and spread to non-controversial parts of the government such as the post office and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a good chunk of Jews.

I'm surprised they don't already do that?

The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low. Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the population every month to catch a rare event like that.

Run pooled testing on blood donations, sewage or airplane waste water.

With consent. Please say with consent.

How do you develop a storage buffer for things you haven't even encountered? Also, freezing and thawing is an imperfect process that can damage cells. Sure we might luck out too..

But yeah, like the other poster said, the bill-gates-corona-5G-mind-control-implant folks are going to have a field day with that :D

The PDF is at https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... :

Some details of the positive test collection dates by state:

    *Illinois Jan 7, Jan 20, Jan 22, Feb 21, Feb 24
    *Massachusetts Jan 8
    *Wisconsin Feb 3
    *Pennsylvania Feb 15
    *Mississippi Mar 6

5 were Black, 2 were Latino/Hispanic, 2 were White

Page 20 shows that there was a lot of unbalance for the states with samples. Texas for example only had 84 samples processed, but Illinois had 2,426.

re:Black, Latino/Hispanic, White. Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. I had to ask if I was Hispanic. I speak Spanish, live in Spain but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. N. B. there is no reason for them to even ask if you are or are not. And no, I could not chose to be Hispanic: its a term assigned to you. Some Spanish nationals are Hispanic some are not. Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. It does not matter where you were born or the colour of your skin. Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for "lying" on the visa form.

That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.

Are you sure? Are the standards for who qualifies according to the law documented somewhere?

I always thought that you’re legally able to self-identify however you deem accurate on those government forms in the U.S?

Latino/Hispanic is not considered a race by the US government, it's an ethnic group. Latino covers all people of Latin descent including native Spaniards and Portuguese.

> Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race.

No, its not.

Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnic category independent of race.

And it doesn’t mean “speaking Spanish”, it means: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” [0]

> but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans.

Told by whom? Obviously this is deeply false. It also contradicts your later claim that:

> Some Mexicans are not Hispanic.

So, I'm not clear what your story is, is it that it is just an "official racist" code for "Mexican" or is it …something else?

> Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for “lying” on the visa form.

Neither the immigrant nor non-immigrant visa application form asks for ethnicity in general or Hispanic origin in particular. [1][2]

[0] See, e.g., the Census page on it, even though the policy is government-wide where race/ethnic data is collected, under OMB directive: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/abo...

[1] nonimmigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-...

[2] immigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.p...

I, too, had a very bad cold in December 2019 and January 2020. With a lot of exhausting dry cough and no unusual bacteria cultivated from samples. Five weeks of utter misery.

But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe back then must have been something else.

The title should really be: as expected, no evidence of Coronavirus infections earlier than original Wuhan outbreak found in the US.

With the amount of passenger flights leaving Wuhan daily, it's completely expected to see rapid spread in December, given the current theory of a November initial outbreak.

In early December 2019 my son in the US West got something that perfectly matches covid: looked like a cold, it got bad and then he got better, then two days later is got much worse. So we took him to the hospital and they concluded he had pneumonia, and also that it was not the flu. We treated the pneumonia and he got better and we all moved forward. My other son and wife also got milder cases, while I was mostly fine (but not 100%). There's no way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly was not the Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid symptoms. We'll never know, unless somehow they find the stuff collected by the hospital and analyze it again.

You can get antibody tests now to find out.

If you've also been vaccinated is it possible to distinguish that?

Edit: I suppose in this case they could test prior samples, but if you don't have any, you're out of luck?

I wonder if it’s theoretically possible to construct a historical timeline of immunity development for an individual by taking multiple tests, sounds like a proper forensics work than something to do just out of curiosity.

I know this! It depends on the antibody test - if you can get a test for the nucleocapsid antibodies, that will determine whether you had the disease or not. People who are vaccinated will test positive for the spike protein, but will not test positive for the nucleocapsid antibodies, at least with the vaccines currently available (I believe there are vaccines in development that target both proteins, but not yet available).

Some antibody tests target spike or nucleocapsid, some target both, so you need to check which tests they are using and verify what it tests against (or ask your doctor to order a specific test that checks for the nucleocapsid antibodies).

I learned this when I was part of a vaccine study and was curious to know whether I had gotten the vaccine or the placebo, and was able to use a spike antibody test to confirm that I was in the vaccine group.

Donate blood with the red cross and they'll test for antibodies. I had a miserable flu-like illness over Christmas '19. It's probably the sickest I had ever been in my life. When the publicity started blowing up over the pandemic, my dad suggested that maybe I had caught it while I was traveling for job interviews in the previous weeks and months. I eventually donated blood in 2020 and sure enough, I tested false for antibodies. I've donated twice since, and the first was negative. Waiting to see what the next one says since I've been vaccinated.

I've heard quite a few stories like this, and anecdata though it may be, I find it very intriguing. How WOULD we know? There seems to me to be a pretty consistent timeline: confirmed cases and rampant spread in other countries, the first confirmed cases in the US and rampant spread among vulnerable populations (nursing homes, etc.), and subsequently the overwhelming of ICUs. Each step seemed to take a few weeks, and progress consistently. There's a lot of suspicion from some that things were misreported, and some of that is the typical lies-with-statistics, etc. but I know enough people who were working in nursing homes and in ICUs that I personally trust the general timeline to be reality.

So what's up with these early possible cases? I wonder how plausible it is that it there was some early spread of the same disease, but vulnerable populations were just luckily avoiding exposure. It really seemed to take off in the US in those nursing homes. IIRC that's what happened in Seattle, and that's what happened in my county. THAT'S what wiped out most of our body count, and that's what initially overwhelmed ICUs. And that's what raised a lot of awareness, and probably a few self-diagnosed false positives too. Could genuine COVID cases have been going around before then and just not getting the attention, or causing as much damage until that point?

No. We have plenty of ways of detecting a large scale Covid epidemic after the fact, even if it ended up somehow avoiding all people from the risk groups. Analysis of historical blood samples for antibodies. Early population-wide antibody tests. Phylogenetic analysis. Wastewater analysis.

Think of just how contagious Covid would have been before we knew about it and started taking precautions. You could only introduce Covid into a country a few times before it'd inevitably start a self-sustaining transmission chain. We have no credible proof of that happening in the west until 2020.

Isn't that what the study is suggesting though? They are looking back (like you point out) and finding it earlier than we all thought?

That is the kind of study they did, yes. And the results are consistent with commonly accepted timeline, not with the "I had Covid in October 2019 but they covered it up" crackpots.

The prevalence they found is extremely low, less than 0.05%, despite their samples going all the way back to Mid-March. Since they did not test on any samples that are definitely pre-Covid (e.g. early 2019, late 2018), we can't calibrate their false positive rate. But if we assume the specificity of the tests was 99% which seems on the high end for antibody tests, and that the false positives are uncorrelated, we're already in the region of false positives feasibly explaining literally all of their samples.

The data is just totally inconsistent with any kind of widespread transmission of Covid in the US in 2019.

How many of your detection mechanisms were actually carried out?

I think the most useful measure that was actually carried out were the handful of places that take samples for flu surveilance that were able to retest the samples for covid. Of course, in many places, you can't actually convince a doctor to take a sample for flu-like illness, so there's no data.

All of them have been done in practice, of course.

>How WOULD we know?

Antibody tests after the fact would reveal whether or not these were Covid cases. You'd have to be tested before the antibodies disappeared, though.

> There's no way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly was not the Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid symptoms

Many things match those symptoms though, such as other strains of coronaviruses e.g. HKU1 or NL63, which although rare, were certainly more prevalent in the US in december 2019 thant SARS-CoV-2

Similar experience but late December/early Jan after a flight. I got a terrible cough and was laid up for a day and my youngest got Pneumonia and was notably "our-of-breath" for a few weeks afterwards.

So I have always wondered, however this occurred during holiday gatherings and no one else in the group really got it so I've kind of written it off as some 'other' less contagious virus.

Did you lose your sense of smell or taste?

I have dozens of friends who report a terrible cold with many of these symptoms during the Dec19-Jan20 time period. I had it myself. What's notable about all these anecdotes is that not a single one of them remembers experiencing the #1 most distinctive COVID symptom: losing the sense of smell. Of course, not every COVID sufferer experiences that, but you'd think if there was an outbreak of real COVID during that time we'd have heard a lot of reports of it. Take a look at all the people reporting being sick back then on this HN thread alone -- nobody leads with the most distinctive COVID symptom.

Yup, same experience in Nov. 2019-early jan 2020. My roommate came back from China sick and passed it to me. I was the most sick I've been in my life, 'out-of-breath' symptoms and couldn't taste anything for about 3 weeks. Took me 2.5 months to fully recover.

I wish I had it on hand, but I have seen it more than once, including not long after it came out: in October 2019, one of the 4chan folks, one of the lab geeks, posted that they had seen a fairly unusual virus come trucking through in the SARS family. I saw the screenshot posted again around December.

I would not be even a little shocked if it were kicking around in early 2019, or even before. Just think of how HIV was skulking about, smoldering, before really catching on the tinder.

here's the archived 4chan post [0]. The op is sort of ridiculous and not relevant, but the poster with id pUlkHE7L post some PCR stuff which is very strange to post at that date (21 october 2019 if the timestamps are correct). However, SARS-CoV-2 is 30kb not 35kb.

[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/

Not a big difference between 30kb and 35kb if running gel.

That's the one! Yeah, the timestamps are right, that's when I remember seeing it.

Thank you for finding it.

I think it is fairly obvious that this virus could have circulated considerably earlier than the first confirmed cases in Wuhan mid November 2020, given its nature of asymptomic spread and form of disease which easily could be mistaken for something else.

The work with blood sample analysis should be done all over the planet and its range should be broadened to samples earlier than January 2020.

>given its nature of asymptomatic spread

Does anyone have a pointer to the latest information on asymptomatic spread? This is the latest thing I've found, and it doesn't seem to think asymptomatic spreading is likely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

Agreed.

This is the big study, a city wide screening in Wuhan found not a single documented case:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

And beyond that this is a meta-analysis of 54 studies showing near 0 presymptomatic/asymptomatic rate:

https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researche...

You can estimate the date of the outbreak's origin with phylodynamics, using the diversity of circulating SARS-CoV-2 and its mutation rate to estimate the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) as 27.11.2019 [CI 07.11.2019 - 11.12.2019]. "Considerably earlier" doesn't fit the evidence

https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiologi...

It could have been spreading somewhere else, undetected or mistaken for something else.

It's possible that a mutation emerged in november 2019 that pushed the R number up. A "mild" form of the virus could very easily have lingered in China/SEA for years.

Definitely, especially if the virus was a zoonotic leak and was poorly adapted to humans, perhaps with R only slightly above 1 until it adapted.

In California we have lifted mask, and distancing requirements; in most situations.

In all honesty, I didn't mind wearing a mask, and distancing.

For one, I didn't have a cold, or flu, this winter.

More importantly, and I'm probally in the minority; I have Never liked people I don't know getting to close to me be at DMV, Doctor's office, or the supermarket. Tipsy at the bar is another story.

I was hoping social distancing would stick around after the panademic.

I guess I'm a bit anti-social?

I've noticed the vocal proponents of distancing, and mask wearing, are people whom salary depends on crowds, or packing people into small spaces.

I watching Bill Maher right now. He was a big proponent of being safe. Now---he's on the opposite side. Why--he makes part of his living by crowding people into stadiums for his chuckle fest?

Even before the pandemic, I always wondered why doctors were perfectly fine with having a waiting room with sick patients, all breathing the same air.

I thought I had covid before news of covid even came out. Was googling “novel pneumonia type illnesses” and reading about sequelae. I had had close contact with wuhan travelers in late dec. 2020. Mostly fatigue and headache for a week, then the lung issues started and lasted a month or more. A few weeks later the first couple of California cases from China presented at a local er. Few cared at that point as the politics were inverted early on due to the travel ban, and also the super bowl and impeachment vying for the public’s attention.

I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.

I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.

If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu.

What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.

Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID.

As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.

I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu.

I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.

Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard. I am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the timing was definitely odd.

> But the timing was definitely odd.

A nasty cold or flu hitting in the middle of cold and flu season isn’t that odd, as timing goes.

Sure, in 2020 it’s a coincidence that naturally raises the “was it COVID?” question, but not really odd timing if it wasn’t.

Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had covid in the past few months prior.

Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.

> seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.

I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had not had Covid.

The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).

In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have caught covid.

And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was definitely something that was going around at that time.

I had one of the flu variants (tested positive for flu) from 2019-20 in December, followed by a really bad cold (no tests) in Feb, followed by COVID (confirmed by tested contacts, an antibody test and a fully checked "weird COVID symptoms" bingo card) in March.

2019-20 was definitely a season for nasty colds/flus, not just COVID.

The timing was odd because of how severe the cough was. I have had plenty of colds through out my life, and this was by far the worst.

It's possible you had covid, but I think the odds are stronger that you just had a different respiratory illness that was going around at the time.

Another variable is that you are also older with a less robust immune system than when you've had colds in your youth. This is why anecdotes are always worthless. You need statistical power to overcome these latent variables that could be biasing your conclusions.

Did anyone from your office later catch covid? If anyone did, the lack of immunity would suggest it wasn't.

Not that I am aware of.

Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very ill as well.

I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with each case.

All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death bed.

We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.

Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break. Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect that pretty much nails it as covid for me.

First time I’ve seen i18n used like this in the wild.

We're among friends here, so I didn't even give it a 2nd thought... :)

My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms point more towards whooping cough.

Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.

Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion, which I normally should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like, crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later. No one else around me caught it.

Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections in the US before they were first detected; they don’t suggest that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is plausible, ‘almost impossible’ looks to me like it’s rather understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of Covid.

I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough, full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19, particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases.

I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the first illness was something else.

I had something similar in 2017

Everything unfolded so quickly last year… late Feb I went through SeaTac twice for work travel. By St. Patricks day my state was in full lockdown and there were TP and sanitizer shortages. I think a week later my company shutdown its HQ campus and specifically one of the buildings I had been a month earlier was a super-spreader site.

Everything seemed so normal in Jan/Early Feb 2020…

The real timeline is most certainly earlier than the official one.

https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649

It was already reported in Chinese national TV on Dec 31, 2019 there was pneumonia with unclear reason: http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?i...

The crucial bit of information is omitted - were these cases locally acquired or were they imported? Did the NIH follow up on that?

My mother-in-law got a weird cold at around October where she lost her sense of smell for a few days.

So did my brother in Jan 2021. Turns out it was sinus related :)

So what do you see if you examine blood samples further back than January 2020?

They found covid-19 Antibodies in Italian blood samples from September 2019.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/

PCR tests on Spanish sewer water found positive samples even earlier in 2019. I think the earliest so far French case was in early December 2019. I hope lots more studies are proceeding.

That aspect gets largely ignored in any discussion regarding Covids origin. Impossible to follow those really early cases up, tracing the infection lines I guess.

why is all this 'new information' the same information that was around last year?....like it's all about a year old.....I was reading articles about this last year in June...

For context, I don’t usually get sick, and if I do, I rarely if ever get seriously sick. I’ve been seriously sick a handful of times in my life and have definitely had the flu before.

Nov. 13th, 2019, I started to come down with a pretty bad cold and left work early. My commute is along a popular train route from downtown to airport (lots of contact points during rush hour).

My kids were also not feeling well and we went into the doctors that afternoon. The reaction was typical, “you’ve caught a virus, probably the flu.” At this point my wife was fine.

For the next 5 days my fever started to increase and I was knocked out incapacitated. It was the worst that I had ever felt. I can safely say that you can eat jumbo freezies with a fever and won’t experience brain freeze. On Monday the 18th, I went back to the doctor and he listened to my chest and heard the distinctive crackling of pneumonia. He sent me for a chest x-ray and it came back positive. Immediately I was put on antibiotics. Note that I never felt in distress breathing. A few days later it wasn’t getting better, and I went back to the doctors. They increased my dose and also prescribed me a “superbug inhibitor”. I was out of commission for another week before I started to work from home and feeling better.

Doctors told me I had bacterial pneumonia. No one did any real tests, nasal swabs, or blood.

On Nov. 24th my wife came down with a terrible cold as we had plans to take our family to a theme park. This turned into a stressful trip because she came down sick mid-trip and needed Tylenol frequently.

The kids at this point had not shown any real symptoms. Only mild symptoms that came and went.

On November 30th, I went to the hospital to get checked out because I was scheduled to travel to re:Invent on Dec. 1st. The pneumonia was still present and they couldn’t tell if it were getting smaller or not (no baseline). They did take my blood though, although no one commented on it. Effectively the doctors told me I was good to travel. Doctors had conflicting opinions on whether I was contagious, or even whether I had a virus or bacterial infection. The double regime of antibiotics and “super bug inhibitor” seemed to do the trick for me.

With that in hand I made the decision to travel to Las Vegas. Note that at this point I no idea about Covid-19 but over the next few weeks the reports started to come in, but I still didn’t think about myself being sick.

At re:Invent, if you were there, I was the guy with the dry persistent cough which my doctor eventually labeled the “100-day cough” (no kidding).

The trouble began almost immediately once I returned from the trip. People I had socialized with were telling me that I made them sick. That felt terrible, and I had been at work at this time and still coughing. Out of respect for folks I decided to work from home for the next couple of weeks. The team I had sat near, then reported all coming down with a terrible cold that weekend.

This is all anecdotal of course and no one else I knew came down with pneumonia. Around mid-December I took time off until the new year and effectively sequestered with my family.

The only time I felt the pneumonia was when I exerted myself physically. It felt like pressure on my chest. It was still visible on a CT scan in March 2020 when I was admitted to hospital over a potential concern of Covid due to travel (paranoia). I tested negative for Covid via a nasal swab.

Work Travel Timeline: - In early November to Minnesota - In December to Las Vegas - In January to London - In late Feb / early March to NYC

I came home from NYC just as reports were surfacing of a man getting sick near Times Square, where I had been located.

All the while the Covid reporting / story was unfolding. The “joke” was that I was probably patient zero. This is not a funny joke.

There is some trust that our medical doctors will do the right thing and we have sentinel programs in place. What struck me about the Covid reporting was how it was presented in the Lancet and immediately became political. Doctors are reporting cases of “pneumonia with unknown origin.” This got me thinking, none of the doctors that investigated me collected blood or nasal swabs. It was all shrugged off as being “flu” or “bacterial pneumonia” a result of “flu.” IIRC there were reports of 2019/2020 being a bad flu season.

My thanks go out to the brave Chinese doctors that first identified the gene sequence and shared the data in an effort to prevent pandemic. You are heroes, even if our governments dropped the ball and we’re incapable of making tough decisions based on a lack of early and lagging data in some cases, or because they didn’t share enough data.

When we started to hear about antibody tests, and sewage testing being able to show community spread I was certain we would detect Covid in Nov/Dec in NA by looking back. I’m not convinced this testing ever really happened only because I “really expect we would find traces.”

At this point we had just entered lockdown (March 2020) and I still haven’t gotten my hair cut. We still don’t know the origins of Covid but we are all told that it started in Wuhan. The first cases were all people who had travelled to or come into contact with people from Wuhan. The serious cases were all mostly associated with elder case homes.

Was it a lab accident, or a cave, or an animal that mated with a bat from a cave? Then there is all of us who have this collective experience of thinking we had Covid back in late 2019 / early 2020. Probably not?

I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted.

The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often. I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had something that "surely might have been COVID".

I have a weird itch on my a-- right now. It is the next pandemic.

I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc).

The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost every other resp virus has disappeared.

Last November/December was for me the strangest flu season ever, coughing and sneezing for abnormally long period, my coworkers and mother also. And after, in January, I got a really strange what looked like herpes in the face. Followed by finger infection which I had never had, which could mean my immune system was abnormally weak

So that's that

Thats another variable here. People get older and are more weak over time. Diseases hit you worse in your 30s than in your 20s. Health conditions also tend to crop up after a certain age, like heart conditions that you might blame on a vaccine instead of just you getting older and being predisposed to this condition.

At the company was a range of people, everyone gets older I know... Also an old relative of a coworker died unexpectedly

At the time I remember thinking it could be something from the office AC unit, dirty filters etc...

It might not have been Covid, maybe something unidentified, but definitely something abnormal

April last year, when this whole thing hit, we had people under throwaway accounts including myself speaking about this on HN, and as expected we hit a roadblock because anecdotes aren't data and whatever, so we were downvoted, called conspiracy theorists and other nonsense. There's ultimately nothing for any of us to gain in lying that we've been asked, by our doctors, going back to October of 2019, whether or not we've been to Wuhan (asked specifically and point blank).

There's a lot more that we know than we are willing to share because HN just isn't a good platform for this sort of discussion anymore. It's too politicized and too many bruised, sensitive egos that can't handle contrary thinking. So for the rest of you, you'll have to get used to constantly having to shift and re-evaluate what you think you "know" and how you feel about a certain thing today, and the kind of statements and comments you've made in the past based on events that you think did or did not happen (because you've been told, and you believe what you're being told by the big media) when, in fact, it may turn out that the "truth" was factually incorrect or hidden from you to begin with.

Take it however you may, just please don't shoot the messenger.

Nytimes had articles on it in late dec 2019, and january 2020. April 2020 is months past my states emergency orders.

I agree. But people seemed to not be able to entertain the thought that doctors were aware something was happening back in October. In their minds, I think, if the big media did not have an article on it, then it doesn't exist. This is a grievous state of affairs for discussions, because it means NYT and others are effectively the Ministry of Truth for HN.

Dude, it's one thing sharing your experience, and a whole different to assume that doctors knew and are hiding something. Just because there were scattered cases here and there doesn't mean that the medical community could correlate them all and understand what they were dealing with.

Here is an example of a thread where we all knew for a fact that the virus could not have spread as early as it did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963

Reminds me of this, which is a comically recurring thing on HN:

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Wait, what evidence is there that the virus was spreading in August 2019? From a quick Google search, this source [0] published not long ago claims they think earliest it could possibly have been was mid-October of 2019.

[0]: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-03-18-novel...

It spread in the fall of 2019, which is late September, October, November, and December. That would put it in line with spreading in the US in December.

Hey, that’s my post :-D I think it still holds up. The virus being “present” in the US in December isn’t the same as being spread widely.

This new NIH survey still offers no reason to doubt the timeline that the virus emerged around October 2019 in Wuhan and only became a serious threat in late November/December, when hospitalizations began to rise and some doctors started warning of a SARS re-emergence. A widespread COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan during August 2019 continues to seem unlikely to me.

What I remember was people arguing that it was present earlier where also making the argument that infection was widespread. And thus the case fatality ratio was 100 times lower than the 0.7% the Chinese were reporting.

Same with anyone who was saying “it’s airborne” or “the case fatality rate is inflated” or “it could have leaked from that lab”.

And now, behold as the intellectual class attempts to delete these mistakes from our collective memory.

no one is deleteing anything...they are simply learning, as science does, and noting that prior knowledge was incorrect.

That is fundamentally different from people screaming without evidence. A broken clock is right twice a day, but it is not an accurate clock at any point.

It was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and note the word “attempts”. This one is much too big/high profile to delete, thankfully.

The “this is just how to do science” defense is cute, but a lot people died and will die over it, and in general the conduct we have seen from formerly-trusted authorities is inexcusable. Most people are not going to let that gang of narrow-minded bullies “do science” to them ever again.

a gang of narrow minded bullies?

This is what we are calling the field that ended polio and smallpox.

Sure it is still the same field, but far too many “experts” today are charlatans operating on inherited credibility, in all the fields.

I'm sorry no, this is not "they are simply learning, as science does"

People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day

In my opinion you are completely right, but calling this out makes a lot of people very mad.

I'm not mad, I just have been taught that retcon'ing evidence to fit a narrative is not the same thing as science. It doesn't matter how well it fits or evidence, it should be rejected because the base structure of the argument fails.

These people aren't 'right' in the sense that they figured something out, they screamed about something without evidence.

Whatever happens next cannot change that fact. Its notable that what is happening is the evidence is getting constantly substituted to fit an explanation not the explanation emerging from the available evidence.

It's the boy who cried wolf...

Stop trying to tie it to your politics. Some people want real evidence before they scream about things like you do. It had little to do with Trump.

Wrong because the alternative had no real evidence either.

It absolutely had everything to do with Trump. He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd) presented political opportunities. In an election year, everything becomes about the election. People wanted to attack Trump at every turn, even when he suggested reasonable measures like controlling travel, and equally they wanted to ensure all blame was directed at Trump rather than the Chinese government or state governments or elsewhere.

To address your claim more directly, there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory, or claim it was debunked (as many news outlets did), or censor conversations about it online. This isn't about believing it is the only possibility, but that it is a likely possibility that deserves serious attention. The reason it was instead cloaked in dogmatic terms like "conspiracy theory" and shutdown outright, is purely because of politics. There was no "real evidence" to dismiss it as it was. And guess what - that dismissal also allowed the Chinese government to avoid a site visit for months, and even when the WHO visit happened, it was under the terms of the Chinese government with an untrustworthy outcome. Those who shutdown the lab leak theory and other such claims aren't interested in evidence. They're interested in political opportunism.

> there was never any justification to dismiss the lab leak theory

that isn't how this works. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

> censor conversations about it online

they did a poor job of that then, considering all the very vocal people I had to hear keep talking about it for the last year.

>He was slated to be the clear winner until two events (COVID-19 and George Floyd)

weird how that works, huh? when you handle crises poorly -- or downright negligently -- people will hate you and not vote for you. strange.

> extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

The claim is not exactly extraordinary - you have a lab with a history of poor controls, performing gain of function research relating to SARS-like viruses, knowing that SARS (the first one) had broken out of labs multiple times. That's not hard evidence, but it is a strong set of priors that makes the lab leak theory an obvious candidate for an origin story. It shouldn't be surprising that there isn't hard evidence when the world hasn't been allowed a timely and transparent investigation. And why would China allow such an investigation when there's no pressure to do so, when people are rushing to their defense to dismiss the valid lab leak theory as a "conspiracy theory"? Their work was done for them by news media and tech giants who institutionalized that dismissive attitude, again motivated by their own political biases. You can't have evidence until you take the speculation seriously and perform the necessary investigation properly, so I'm not sure how you could for "extraordinary evidence".

> weird how that works, huh?

You're ignoring the point I was making, which was that the people opposed to Trump were desperate for any way to attack him, given that he was on a clear path to re-election. Since this was the only crisis at the time that they could leverage, they did so (and did so viciously). That included dismissing any scrutiny directed at China, even though it was valid.

> there is zero evidence of a lab leak besides circumstantial.

First, there are credible, credentialed virologists saying that the lab leak hypothesis has not been ruled out, and that it has been inadequately investigated [1].

Second, there are real anomalies in the Covid genome [2] that seem unlikely to have occurred naturally:

however, several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 taken together are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. These include a low rate of evolution in the early phase of transmission; the lack of evidence for recombination events; a high pre-existing binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2); a novel furin cleavage site (FCS) insert; a flat ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) of the spike protein which conflicts with host evasion survival patterns exhibited by other coronaviruses; and high human and mouse peptide mimicry.

In particular, the furin cleavage site is extremely interesting because it's exactly the type of genetic manipulation done in gain of function research that was ongoing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. More on the FCS:

Because the presence and coding sequence of a FCS is important for pathogenesis, host range, and cell tropism (Nagai et al. 1993; Millet et al. 2015), the addition of a FCS into viruses has been an active area of gain-of-function research. A FCS can be easily inserted using seamless technology (Yount et al. 2002; Sirotkin and Sirotkin 2020) without any need for cell passage, as previously performed in experiments on virulence and host tropism (Cheng et al. 2019). Insertions to change the properties of SARS-r CoV viruses are documented by Ren et al. (2008) and Wang et al. (2008). Considering that natural mutations have a very low probability to result in a stretch of 12 amino acids coding for an optimized FCS without any known intermediate form in Sarbecovirus, an artificial insertion of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 may provide a more parsimonious explanation for its presence than natural evolution.

In summary, the FCS confers SARS-CoV-2 enhanced human pathogenicity and has never been identified in another Sarbecovirus. At the same time, FCSs have been routinely inserted into coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments, and we provide a hypothesis through which the specific amino acid sequence of SARS-CoV-2′s FCS may have been generated through cell culture.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0

> People were against this emotionally since Trump suggested it first and no one wanted to be seen agreeing with him on something, even though a broken clock can be right twice a day

Trump wanted to use some inappropriate names for the disease and wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports. Neither of those things make sense to do from a disease control standpoint. If you wanted to ban travel for people who had been in the area of exposure, that might make sense, but nation of passport isn't the way; and after not a whole lot of time, the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted.

We very regularly associate things with their origin. We did so almost this entire last year when we talked about variants of COVID-19. And in the early days of COVID-19, in China, in their airports, the virus was called "Wuhan virus" on signage. Those names were also used in news reports regularly. I agree that something like "kung flu" is inappropriate, but I don't agree that "China virus" or "Wuhan virus" are inappropriate, and don't think they were controversial until they were deemed as such for what seems like political reasons.

> wanted to ban travel for people holding PRC passports

Banning by passport makes some sense. We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes. But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries. In terms of a quick, easy to implement measure, that will at least reduce the number of imported cases, banning travel based on PRC passports seems logical.

> the disease had spread widely enough that there weren't really many places that should have been whitelisted

Surely, given that we do care about just controlling the numbers even if it is not perfect (like with "flatten the curve"), it makes some sense to focus on the epicenter.

> We can't prevent US citizens from returning to their homes.

SCOTUS has ruled that the US does have quarantine powers for medical emergencies, even for its own citizens. Maybe a complete ban if poorly orchestrated might run afoul of the Constitution, but a policy like "all travelers [US citizen or not] from X region must present at <specific port of entry>, whereupon they will be transferred to a quarantine facility for 14 days" would totally be fine. Note, for example, the way that the quarantine on dogs because of rabies is being handled.

> But we can prevent others from traveling to the US. It might make sense to ban all passports except the US for flights originating from China, but then you end up dragging in connecting flights through China from other countries.

Why should you exempt people whose only presence was via connecting flights? This generally involves long layovers inside of airports, where a large enough fraction is potentially susceptible to already be concerned about (due to local people making their flights), and you're likely to be spending a decent period of time on the plane with such people as well, too.

I would argue, philosophically, the broken clock isn't right twice a day. That clock is simply saying the same thing as people who are right. It's claim about what time it is has no credibility.

I have a friend who's Toddler knows that things have colors but only knows one color - Blue. If the child calls everything Blue it isn't showing understanding of the concept, even if the kid responds 'Blue' when asked what color the sky is. To claim that is 'right' is projecting my beliefs and knowledge onto the childs.

Case fatality rate wasn't inflated, it was deflated if anything.

And there is still no real evidence of a lab leak, despite western intelligence continually lying about it.

You sound kind of bruised with a big ego?

My wife works in healthcare and caught some random respiratory illness in December 2019 that lingered on for 3 weeks. Her o2 levels the entire time was hanging around 94-96% so eventually we went to see her PCP. He found "adventitious" sounds in her lungs via stethoscope and prescribed her some steroids. It had an immediate effect and I thank god everyday she was diagnosed and treated before MSM made covid the black plague.

There are thousands of travelers flying from China to the US every single day. It seems obvious that the earliest infections would be sooner than January 2020. I remain unsurprised by these new findings, because past conversations around this topic would always be shut down or dismissed, leading to no serious, balanced conversation. Common sense and reasonable speculation were met with vitriol and people tried to claim a moral high road of "trusting the science". Just like with the lab leak theory not actually being "debunked", this too is further evidence of how echo chambers, politics, and groupthink have corrupted discourse.

totally agree, it's funny seeing the idea that covid spread much earlier, which is completely reasonable, being dismissed.

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