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Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-...).

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.

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.

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.

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

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