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Comment by dyingkneepad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You can get antibody tests now to find out.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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 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.

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