4 ms·
Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories... I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it
by nyczomg 6y ago
Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories...
I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she eventually recovered. The rest of our family had at least mild symptoms, and given how infectious it is - how would we not have gotten it given we did no distancing whatsoever.
The thing I am trying to wrap my mind around, is that if it was so prevalent before we knew about it - how did we not notices so many people dropping dead, etc? I have two thoughts that I would love to explore more.
1. We know about the placebo effect. Why would there not be a reverse placebo effect for this virus? If my wife had been seeing non stop covid news in February about how scary this disease is, why would she not start panicking, having more breathing problems, worse symptoms, and maybe even take a turn for the worse? If giving a sugar pill to someone and calling it medicine can improve outcomes - surely watching dire cable news about how people with your symptoms are dying left and right could do the opposite.
2. Maybe those of us who got it early were lucky, because they just weren't exposed over and over like people who finally got it in March/April.
If either or both of these things were true, then it could explain why/how the fatality rate rose dramatically in March/April, which would explain better how this could fly under the radar for so long, but be so prevalent.
And who knows - maybe someday I'll get a chance to take an antibody test and will find that I'm wrong and my family just got hit with a bad cold.
- fourbits 6y agoIt's called the Nocebo effect [1]. It's discussed on Mind Field S2 E6 The Power of Suggestion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
- cblum 6y agoGoing off a tangent here but just wanted to comment how powerful the nocebo effect can be. I'm familiar with it in the context of strength sports, where "tweaking" your back, knees, etc. is relatively common. If you tweak something and immediately go "oh no no no I'm gonna be out for weeks now", it does happen. The pain only seems to get worse for days, you can't move, if it's your lower back sometimes you can barely get out of bed. When you learn to distinguish between "I'm hurt" (something felt a little funny and it hurt a bit, but you're still functional) vs "I'm injured" (something actually went really wrong, like a major muscle strain, or blunt trauma), and learn to keep a positive attitude in the face of pain, you're back in a couple days. There's a group called Barbell Medicine that completely changed my mindset when it comes to nocebo. They teach people to accept pain is part of life, and to assess it instead of immediately worrying or panicking about it and going into what they call "movement avoidance".
- izend 6y agoThree reasons to why it may not have been "noticed": 1. Early on it had only spread in a small percentage of the populace so the absolute number of deaths was too low to be noticed. 2. The deaths from the regular flu this year were very low, see: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ 3. The antibodies test out of Europe and NYC are pointing to an IFC around 0.35-0.6 which could "only" be 3-6x the bad 2017 flu season, note Covid19 is still the worse pandemic in decades.
- marci 6y ago1. There's a Dr. House episode* about this phenomenon. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox6HWOjbDSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox6HWOjbDSI