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feral

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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

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

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 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.

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...

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