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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019, at the end of Jan I flew to the UK and at the airport literally every single Asian person wore a mask, and myself. I didn't see any non-asian person wearing a mask. Wore mask the whole flight, on the way home I had 2 elderly people on the plane tell me I was scaring them for wearing a mask.

I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH.

I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.

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> We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019

That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]

> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.

> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.

https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...

Taiwan notified the WHO on the 31st of Dec.

Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.

> Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019.

That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports.

It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1],

> WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.

They received word about that "media statement" from Taiwan. The "media statement" was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and distributed on PTT, a Taiwanese social network.

> The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.

China did not allow these statements to be made public until around January 20 when they finally stated human-to-human transmission was confirmed. At first they detained doctors who tried to speak out.

Taiwan was the first to publicly call it SARS. In early January they sent a team to visit Wuhan, then came back and said "this is SARS".

[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline

So what you're saying is that because Wuhan University sent samples to be tested on the 30th of december for 'sars like virus' sorry 'atypical pneumonia' (commonly used to refer to SARS) which was posted in a forum, which Taiwan picked up and forwarded to the WHO. That Taiwan did not make the WHO aware.

That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.

> That Taiwan did not make the WHO aware.

Huh? Taiwan did make the WHO aware.

> That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.

There is no public record about this novel coronavirus, later called Covid-19, prior to Dec 31 2019. China kept it under wraps. Wuhan doctors knew but they were not allowed to speak out. When they tried, they were detained and threatened with arrest.

Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.

From The facts regarding Taiwan’s email to alert WHO to possible danger of COVID-19, [1]

> To be prudent, in the email we took pains to refer to atypical pneumonia, and specifically noted that patients had been isolated for treatment. Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.

The email text is in this Taipei Times article [2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...

[2] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/12/2...

https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Gossiping/M.1577730263.A.177.html

> Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.

So you don't believe it's possible, at all, for rumours to have been running around prior to the 31st, that there was a possible sars outbreak, prior to Taiwan getting some sort of evidence to submit to the WHO to request information about what's going on.

Absolutely I think it's possible for rumors to have been running around given that Dr. Li Wenliang messaged his group about it as being confirmed to be a coronavirus on Dec. 30 [1]

We seem to have miscommunicated. When you wrote "We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019" I thought you meant you had heard about a confirmed outbreak reported by some reliable news source, not rumors.

What I meant to underscore was that this knowledge did not become public prior to Taiwan notifying the WHO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...

In that case my wording is poor and I apologise for that, sorry.

By 'we' I meant my family and I. My wife is Taiwanese and her family said to be careful because people are saying there was a possible sars outbreak.

I'm glad we sorted it out. And thanks for the lesson. I'll be more careful reading this kind of comment in the future. I didn't realize there were such rumors floating about and just assumed you were talking about actual news reports.

My partner (from Wuhan) had received wechat messages (a shared wechat 'moment') reporting of an outbreak, I believe this was on the 24th of December 2019, however it could have been a few days later. It indicated that there was some type of outbreak and hospitals were becoming full.

Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas.

It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.

> Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas.

I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated.

Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back.

> It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.

Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...

I heard it around that time from gaming news sources as it was expected to effect computer part supply.

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