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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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%.

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

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.

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.

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...

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