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Is it possible that the virus has been circulating in the states since Christmas or earlier? I live in the states, though not in Seattle. My wife's best friend

• lettergram 7y ago
  In January I also had similar symptoms (and I live in a community With probably 30% Chinese). They claimed it was probably influenza B, so perhaps you had that as well (or my docs were wrong)? In either case, I have pneumonia to go with it and gotta day it was awful - 5 days of 105 fever, cough, I could hardly do anything.
• learc83 7y ago
  My brother's wife is also an ESL teacher. She had multiple students who traveled home to Wuhan during the winter break. Shortly after school starting she came down with a cold, gave it to my brother, and he had a pretty bad cough for a month. He's just now getting over it.
  • pmlnr 7y ago
    Last winter in Cambridge, UK, both me and my wife went through something labelled the Queen's Cough. In theory, that was an adenovirus: apart from the brutal cough that got worse if you rested and layed down, it regularly resulted in inner ear inflammation. We suffered from it for nearly a month, we had to take mild tranquilizers - valerian extract - to fall asleep, only to get up coughing for 10-20 mins non stop in tge middle of the night. There are loads of nasty chest infections out there.
    • LyndsySimon 7y ago
      > the Queen's Cough I wonder if that name is derived from "the King's Evil". The King's Evil was scrofula, which is basically infected/inflamed lymph nodes cause by tuberculosis.
    • learc83 7y ago
      Yes, obviously.
• goodcanadian 7y ago
  The general sentiment was that this years flu shot was a dud. The flu shot is a guess at which viruses will be most prevalent this year. A recent study I saw (sorry, I don't have a link) suggested that a single flu shot has little impact on your likelihood of getting the flu this year. If you regularly get flu shots, however, after 4 years, your immunity is significantly increased (I presume because you have be immunised against enough different viruses). No comment on your situation, exactly; I just thought it was an interesting and relevant factoid.
  • throwaway3157 7y ago
    Correct, I've been told by medical professionals that there are hundred(s) of strains but the flu shot only covers the handful of strains they expect to be prevalent for that flu season. I have been wondering how they come up with that prediction though...
    • superkuh 7y ago
      The morbidity and mortality weekly report from a month or so back said that in intentional lab infections the influenza vaccine was only 45% effective in preventing infection this year.
      • dnautics 7y ago
        One wonders if the flu metagenome is evolving to evade our primitive strain selection 'algorithm'
    • baddox 7y ago
      https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm Seems pretty straightforward. They look at which strains people have been testing positive for and how successful the previous vaccines were.
      • rolph 7y ago
        the challenge with influenza vaccines is that the virus can shift character faster than a vaccine can be produced so its a crap shoot of sorts for a good match. This is why we need to perfect much more expedient vaccine production technology other than the attenuated virus method
• gdubs 7y ago
  FWIW our family got hit with the same thing. The cough was... different than anything we’ve experienced in recent memory. I assumed it was the flu (we stayed home and didn’t get tested, but it was pretty brutal.)
  • jp57 7y ago
    Yes. I have trouble describing how bad the cough and lung symptoms were. At one point I remember saying "my lungs itch" and wishing I could find a way to scratch them from the outside.
    • gdubs 7y ago
      My wife fractured a rib from coughing just to give a sense of how bad it was.
  • Ghjklov 7y ago
    I think it was also around December when me and a number of coworkers at the cafe I was working at got sick like this too. I don't know what they did, but I was out for a few days to recover and never went to see a doctor since I don't have any health insurance or provider. I recovered after about a week or so of rest. I no longer work there and am looking for a new job now, but these are tough times. I couldn't have picked a worse time to be looking for work. I wonder how things are gonna go for people such as me who work in jobs that inherently need people at a physical location interacting with people. We can't just remote into work and make coffee for people.
    • alphabettsy 7y ago
      This is certainly a situation that makes clearer the failings of our healthcare policy. We might end up worse than China with so many not having access or being able to afford a doctor or hospital visit.
• 40acres 7y ago
  Definitely. Imagine how long it took for news of the virus to bubble up the Chinese bureaucracy and how many people traveled during that time period.
• knzhou 7y ago
  Almost certainly not. If it had been around for three months, with no control at all, it would be extremely obvious by now.
  • jp57 7y ago
    That's fair, I guess, unless there are many unreported mild cases where infections don't result in pneumonia. Also, it's only been two months since christmas, not three, and many schools' winter breaks last into January, so maybe more like 1.75 months for it to spread from the hypothetical vector of returning Chinese students?
    • knzhou 7y ago
      Sure, but just trace the exponential growth curve China started with two months ago, without the flattening out due to quarantine measures. If this were true, we would have more infections than China by now, people would have noticed.
      • pbourke 7y ago
        We will know more when/if widespread serology testing ramps up. As I understand it, this tests for the presence of antibodies for the coronavirus and thus gives a snapshot of recent infections across the population.
      • jp57 7y ago
        In fact the first symptomatic case in Wuhan was identified on Dec 1, and by Jan 16 there were 41 cases of pneumonia identified. That is about the same span of time as between the end of winter break and today. And Wuhan is a dense city of 11 million while I live in a relatively sprawling American city of < 2 million with essentially nonexistent public transit, so transmission could be slower. Alos, I don't know what typical air quality is like in Wuhan in the winter, but given what I've heard about Chinese cities, more severe impact of respiratory symptoms in China seems plausible too. In any case, I agree that there's a fair amount of uncertainty, but a verdict of "certainly not" seems unwarranted.
• dkarl 7y ago
  Considering how contagious it seems to be, I think if it had been circulating in the U.S. for months under the guise of flu, there would have been a mysterious number of deaths of young, healthy people from flu that would have been recognized in hindsight as Covid-19.
  • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    It's not clear that we would recognize it in hindsight. Flu seasons vary heavily in magnitude, and a large majority of flu tests come back negative in any season.
  • conradev 7y ago
    Mortality in people under 40 for Covid-19 is only 0.2% according to the CCDC study: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... We’d be seeing a number of deaths in older people who would have otherwise been fine
    • pmoriarty 7y ago
      The mortality estimates we have now are mostly based on numbers coming out of China, which are just not reliable. We should have better estimates in a couple of months, once more numbers come out of countries outside of China. Also, mortality rates are impacted not just by the disease itself but things such as how overwhelmed the health care system is, what measures are used to treat the disease, how many people actually get treated, population-specific or location-specific factors, etc. All of these factors could vary widely from place to place and cause different mortality rates, even if the virus infecting everyone is the same.
    • dkarl 7y ago
      In either demographic the mortality is so much higher than the flu that it would be noticed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be worried; it would be like just another strain of the flu.
      • 7y ago
• something_given 7y ago
  Same thing with our family here in the Bay Area, although it happened in mid-February so we're still recovering in some degree or another. Everyone had flu tests across multiple days and all came back negative for both type A & B. Doctors thought about a coronavirus, but since we didn't travel to or have direct contact with anyone who did travel to China, they knew the CDC wouldn't approve the test.
• seadan83 7y ago
  Interesting thought, there was something that was going around, very contagious that everyone got
• catblast 7y ago
  > We just assumed flu because what else could it be? The by far most likely scenario? Not the flu, but any one of the numerous upper respiratory viruses (hundreds but likely rhinovirus) that cause the “common cold” Notably absent from your description of symptoms is fast onset weakness and body aches. Colds can cause short high spiking fever though.
  • jp57 7y ago
    It was not a cold. Nor was a cold the most likely scenario. I've had plenty of colds. I felt okay in the morning and was in bed shivering by dinner time. My wife reported body aches. They are not typical for me even with flu, but I was on ibuprofen almost the entire time anyway. I had a fever for four days, and felt unbearably horrible as soon as the ibuprofen would start to wear off. There was nothing "rhino" about this virus. None of us had any nasal congestion. If my wife hadn't started to feel somewhat better when she did, I would have taken her to the hospital for pneumonia. But it's lucky that she did start to feel better when she did because almost as soon as she was up I was down. Still, even through the next week or so when she was up and moving around again she said she never really felt like she was breathing quite right. The cough was different than any cough I've had before. Since my nose and sinuses were clear, there was no drainage from my nose and sinuses into my chest. It was all originating in my chest.
• triangleman 7y ago
  For point of reference, the clinic where my wife works has been testing for coronavirus since January 25. There are many private institutions with the ability to test patients as they saw fit. I know the protocol was more focused on travel but it seems like there would have been more reports since then. With that said, my family has indeed suffered from the same kind of persistent cough you describe, so I don't know what to make of that.
  • nemonemo 7y ago
    Do you know how many the clinic has tested since then? The ratio between the confirmed cases vs the test count seems about 3% in US, and the total tested number in US is 472 according to CDC.
    • triangleman 7y ago
      I don't know but my wife helped out with a few tests, all negative. The number from the CDC seems low, maybe it's only the tests that were shipped to them?
• stanski 7y ago
  A ton of people at work were sick this December without contact with Chinese students. I would guess it wasn't covid-19 but whatever regular virus was making the rounds.