28 ms·

SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019

• exabrial 6y ago
  I like in KC, KS, USA. So back in early late November early December, I had something that was exactly like Covid19 symptoms: lasted 2.5 weeks, mild fever, fatigue, persistent cough, upper respiratory problems. The doctor said it was likely viral and they couldn't give me anything. Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to test how old my antibodies are IF this was in fact was Sars-Cov-2. I think the bigger question is, let's say it did arrive much earlier that we think, does that mean the virus grows at a much smaller rate than current models?
  • yters 6y ago
    or much faster and less serious
    • xbmcuser 6y ago
      It could also be a different strain that was spreading before it mutated into the more deadly and viral version. The virus spread is weird we can get a super spreader that can spread to 60-70 people like the church in Korea. At the same time I know personally of a family of 8 where 1 person got it had it for almost a week before getting tested positive and then sent to quarantine none of the other family members was infected.
  • dgritsko 6y ago
    Given the correlation between cases and deaths, isn't one of the big arguments against the early community spread theory that we would have seen death rates increase earlier on than they actually did?
    • redis_mlc 6y ago
      No, because the mortality rate is very, very low outside nursing homes. And cause of death in the early days won't be listed as corona, since it was an unknown disease. The Wuhan "first patient" was admitted Dec. 6, but nobody believes he was "patient zero". Since he likely contracted it Dec. 1, that means there were others with corona in Nov. or before. (Chinese people I've talked to invariably mention Oct. as when they started to hear chatter about corona.)
      • taeric 6y ago
        I have been beating this drum for a while. I feel like I'm shouting aliens. The CFR for sixty plus is staggering. Below sixty? Still crappy, but not shut down the world. Below twenty? We wouldn't even notice. The problem is not whether this is more or less scary than the flu (or anything else), it is both. With no solutions aimed at buffering nursing homes/elderly. Am I just insane? This narrative seems completely absent in all of the coverage.
        • JshWright 6y ago
          What narrative... that COVID-19 is most deadly for those over 60? That's literally the only fact that most people know about it. If you think that has been absent in all the coverage, I have no idea what coverage you have been paying attention to.
          • taeric 6y ago
            It is and it isn't. This thread is predicated on an IFR that is a flat 5 or so percent on the population. We all acknowledge that it is deadly. Because it is. And you are right that this is in all the data. But the narrative is still holistic. We are locking down everyone to try and kill the virus. Yes, it could work. But so could strict access to most nursing homes. Wouldn't be cheap, but could have even been more effective. Reasoning that we could reach herd immunity style buffer between the populations. (Note that I flat reject just letting people die. I am not saying to abandon the older at risk crowd. I'm saying take pointed measures to explicitly protect them.)
            • philwelch 6y ago
              This was more or less the original UK strategy: isolate the elderly and go full-bore for herd immunity. They scrapped that plan after they updated the model to account for ventilator shortages. There is lots of commentary on that strategy if you want to go back and read it. Even if you were gonna do this, you’d have to figure out how to isolate high-risk populations as thoroughly as possible, to the point of locking caretakers in with them and whatnot. If you lock everyone down, you have a lot more latitude to half-ass things as long as you keep R below 1. Isolating high-risk populations and deliberately pursuing herd immunity means operating consistently under the assumption that virtually everyone else will, as opposed to may, be contagious.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      If all countries had early community spread, then our knowledge of when death rates "should" measurably increase would be similarly delayed.
      • aquadrop 6y ago
        We're talking about all deaths here. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps clearly shows when all deaths started to grow .
        • elliekelly 6y ago
          Are the spikes in prior year Q4 from the flu? And if so was this year’s flu much more mild? It seems prior to coronavirus the number of excess deaths was quite low compared to past years.
          • aquadrop 6y ago
            Yes, that's how flu looks every year.
    • wirrbel 6y ago
      Yes and no. At the start of an epidemic the excess mortality is not yet measurable, its within the variation of normal deaths, and the "official" numbers of corona deaths (people who die after having been tested positive) are not yet observed because there is no testing. CDC estimates the basic reproduction number to be 6, German Robert-Koch-Institut IIRC around 3. Maybe the presence of earlier, undetected cases have lead to an overestimation of R0.
  • bwooceli 6y ago
    I've run into a number of southern KC suburbanites who are all convinced they had it. One had attended a thing in Vegas in Jan and came back with bad con-crud. Two houses down the whole family is certain they all had it. I'm super skeptical, because the pattern we've seen in "real" hotspots like NY just don't play out the same. It is feasible that it's really only truly devastating to dense populations, but until we have any kind of reliable testing on the infection and recovered side, the only # we can use is the death rate over normal. And that view seems to point in the direction of people not actually having it until after Feb. But here we are, having exhausted 2 months of our collective patience and not demonstrably further along in our ability to measure this thing.
    • Marsymars 6y ago
      The other reason to be skeptical is simply by looking at the positive test rate of jurisdictions with high levels of testing. I was also ill in February and then again in March, but the rate of positive tests for COVID-19 in my area has never made it above low single-digits, so just by the numbers, it's pretty unlikely I had it.
  • cblackthornekc 6y ago
    My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. We both got really sick in January. We had a few of the symptoms that could be just a regular flu. My wife had one symptom that stood out the most was while she was sick, she lost her sense of taste. Not just lessened, but gone. Oh and also from KC.
  • AlexMuir 6y ago
    > I think the bigger question is, let's say it did arrive much earlier that we think, does that mean the virus grows at a much smaller rate than current models? This absolutely makes sense to me and would explain a lot of weirdness in the statistics. Less infectious, with a longer incubation period and circulating among the population for longer.
    • Hokusai 6y ago
      > grows at a much smaller rate than current models? I think that local data, mortality in just one care center, does not seem to fit with slow spread. Many people have died in a short period of time in just one care center. But, as any small sample of data, could be just an anomaly and not a trend. I guess that right now all options are open and as data gets cleared and accumulated we will know more. With more testing it would be easier to be sure who is infected, who has been infected and how the pandemic is behaving.
  • ceedan 6y ago
    I have a friend in Philly who swears he had it around the holidays in December. Said he had a flu that wiped him out for a few days - said he had never had anything like it. After SARS-CoV-2 blew up and symptoms were being discovered, he swears that it's what he had.
    • yborg 6y ago
      At this point everyone that's had a sniffle in the last 6 months will be convinced it was COVID-19. Test data is the only thing that counts.
  • skwb 6y ago
    FWIW SARS-CoV-1 specific antibodies last approximately 3 years or so [1]. The antibody test all have a very high specificity (all I've seen have been 98%+, but I'm going off of memory and not any specific cited information), so you'll for sure know you had it. [1]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/
• redis_mlc 6y ago
  As I've mentioned before, both Wuhan and Shanghai have busy international airports. So it's nice that France has a confirmed corona diagnosis in late Dec., but it looks like corona was widely circulating outside China by Dec. 10.
  • myth_drannon 6y ago
    Source?
    • TickleMeTrumpmo 6y ago
      Common sense.
• seaghost 6y ago
  I’ve also had flu like symptoms mid December for like a week. Was working from home though.
  • lostmsu 6y ago
    So, probably, flu?
• Traster 6y ago
  On the one hand, I think quite a lot of people will have stories about Corona-like symptoms in late 2019, early 2020 before the real 'outbreak'. I wouldn't be surprised if a mild version of the virus had spread throught he world earlier than the current pandemic, but at the same time I think we should wait for more evidence. One case in France is just that - one case.
  • jyrkesh 6y ago
    I had such stories. I got the sickest I've been in years back in the first week of Feb. Fever, chills, dry cough...I was in bed for a week. Then again had some light respiratory stuff in early March. I live alone, isolation was already starting in some places, and I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere that WFH is easy. I had plenty of "I might have already had it!" type conversations. So I got my antibody test last week at my primary care physician. Negative. Was just a bad flu, I guess.
    • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Yeah there are three other flus going around. Folks forget that.
      • jeremyjh 6y ago
        And there are vastly more people infected with them, especially in Dec/Jan. I'm so tired of hearing people's big flu story at this point.
    • saalweachter 6y ago
      > So I got my antibody test last week at my primary care physician. Negative. Was just a bad flu, I guess. As someone who really hopes there will be a long-lasting immunity, I really, really hope you had a bad flu.
    • cowmoo728 6y ago
      There's evidence that some subset of younger, healthier people may not produce measurable IgG antibodies. There was an initial study in China and additional preliminary work in Germany and Mayo Clinic. """ [Elitza Theel's] team has found that it's mostly the sickest patients — those who've been hospitalized — who produce IgG antibodies. And it appears that a small percentage of patients with milder cases of the disease aren't making the robust IgG antibodies. "This is very preliminary," Theel warned. "But there might be a differential immune response between very sick individuals and individuals who have a more mild course of disease." """ https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/antibody-tests-can-t-yet-say-who-s-immune-covid-n1193321 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/antibody-tests-ca... Their definition of "mild" means that you didn't require hospital care. So if you're under ~30 and otherwise healthy, you may be one of the people who beat the infection by some other mechanism. Or you just had influenza. It's impossible to know for sure right now.
• IB885588 6y ago
  Are we sure this isn't a false positive?
  • greendave 6y ago
    > To avoid any false positive result we have taken all the usual precautions and we also confirmed it by two different, techniques and staff. Sure? No. But taking their statement at face value, it does seem unlikely.
  • wirrbel 6y ago
    Given the combination of a positive PCR test result, the symptoms and imaging I think there is strong evidence for an infection.
    • skwb 6y ago
      I completely agree. Pr(False Positive| positive COVID-19 symptoms and positive imaging results)... doesn't seem like a very high probability.
  • hokkos 6y ago
    few chance of a false positive (another virus that match with the small sequence tested), but it could be cross contamination of samples.
• bb2018 6y ago
  Does anyone know if there is currently a source, or if there would be a way to calculate in retrospect, outbreaks in nursing homes? There are hundreds of nursing homes where a sizable portion of the community died in a couple of weeks which is very abnormal. The only reason I'm confused about stories like the one above or the few about Covid-19 in California in January is that wouldn't we see such data inevitably? A lot of people have stories about getting the worst sickness of their life in February which I understand but am also skeptical of (with bias probably 10% of the population gets a self-described worst flu of their life every year and Bayesian thinking would suggest almost none of these were Covid). However, it seems like nursing home data would be concrete.
  • KerrickStaley 6y ago
    I think you're missing a word or two in the second sentence.
    • bb2018 6y ago
      Thank you. I was missing more than a few.
  • bredren 6y ago
    I have a private list of every nursing home / retirement center in the United States. I can not share this, but if someone can propose a way to mesh this with other data, looking for a specific finding I could try it.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      Medicare publishes lots of data on 15,000 of them: https://data.medicare.gov/data/nursing-home-compare https://data.medicare.gov/data/nursing-home-compare
  • bestnameever 6y ago
    Not sure if this would be helpful for you but Los Angeles Public Health has a list of outbreaks at nursing homes in Los Angeles http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/locations.htm http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/locations...
• lvspiff 6y ago
  One of the standout locations of virus activity for me, and just due to sheer lack of it, is Vegas. It makes no sense how a global city like Vegas who had multiple large scale events during the January/February even into early March time frame, and tons of visitors especially for the Chinese new year...215 reported deaths so far. That number although sad is still remarkably low. In a region of 2.2 million with a not great reputation for health and hospitals to only have a death rate of .01% seems amazing with how NY, and countries like France, Spain and Italy have fared. Studies like this and I'm sure the many to come make me really wish we had better contact tracing from the get go and hopefully in years to come there can be some better implementations
  • ummonk 6y ago
    It's possible that there wasn't much transmission from visitors to locals, but rather just visitors transmitting to each other.
    • marcosdumay 6y ago
      There are locals working on every place that visitors go to.
  • rogerkirkness 6y ago
    Look at a map of NO pollution and overlay covid outcomes. It isn't nearly as bad if you have high vitamin D (Vegas) and low NO pollution (mountains only on one side = good).
    • DangerousPie 6y ago
      Is there a study that actually convincingly showed this? Both pollution and infectious disease spread are clearly correlated with population density, so the fact that you see more covid deaths in places with a lot of pollution doesn't mean much unless you statistically control for other effects.
      • xenonite 6y ago
• acqq 6y ago
  The most important information: Some old samples analyzed for SARS-CoV-2 in April, finding one positive who spent two nights in hospital from Dec 27, after admitted as emergency: "taken from a 42 years old. ... One of his child presented with ILI prior to the onset of his symptoms. His medical history consisted in asthma, type II diabetes mellitus. He presented to the emergency ward on December 27 2019 with hemoptysis, cough, headache and fever, evolving for 4 days" ... "evolution was favorable until discharge on December 29,2019." --- ILI == Influenza-like illness Hemoptysis == coughing up of blood
• baybal2 6y ago
  I am out of China at the moment, but I can say from Chinese media buzz is that it is now almost certain that China's SARS numbers already passed hundreds by early-mid November. It appears that by late November, the government first took a notice of the outbreak, and by early December it was already a complete freak out. How the government knew? China has built a nationwide electronic infectious disease reporting system after the first SARS outbreak with specific intent of spotting SARS recurrence. Hospitals in China are required by law to report anything with a remote semblance of SARS into the system. China also holds nationwide drills for infectious disease specialists annually with SARS comeback in mind. Any claim that China was caught unprepared are hard to believe. Given that first reliably confirmed info on Beijing dispatching orders to provincial governments on handling a "disaster" also comes onto first days of December, it seems very, very likely to me that they already knew of it being SARS in December. I also heard of what I have no ability to confirm, like the talk of huge pileups at HK border crossings in first days of December, and a spike of private jet departures.
  • nabakin 6y ago
    Are there any Chinese articles you could link us?
    • baybal2 6y ago
      https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro... SCMP is itself source refer to a third party source. Caixin had a deleted report with about the same message. A few other apparently refer to the same blurry pics with a document saying something about SARS that were going around in Wechat groups in first week of January. The first "something is going on" signal I remember was an article on aboluowang in the last week of December, where they cite a report of major mobilisation in provincial governments, and preparation for "medical emergency" starting first days of December.
      • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
        That article is discussing retrospective case tracing, just like the retrospective analysis being done in France. The case from November was not recognized as a novel virus at the time.
• makomk 6y ago
  One obvious question: if this was already spreading in France by late December 2019, what about all the countries with even more travel to and from China, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc?
  • alliao 6y ago
    Taiwan started checking every flight from Wuhan as early as 31st of December...
    • makomk 6y ago
      Which is apparently after it was spreading within the community in France. Taiwan has substantially more travellers from China than France, as well as direct flights from Wuhan. Based on everything we know so far, the 31st of December was probably too late.
• elipsey 6y ago
  This seems like an important result, but one that we might need to approach with measured confidence. Of 14 samples, from 124 patients in Dec/Jan, one tested positive for COV by PCR. How well can we bound our uncertainty about false positive in such circumstances?
  • ImaCake 6y ago
    I don't think we have any statistical tests that will give us any kind of certainty with a 1/14 result. At best you could assume it fits the expected value (maximum likelihood) of a binomial distribution[0], which gives us a 35% chance that the next sample of 14 such people would have no cases at all. 0. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D14+p+%3D1%2F14 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+...
    • contravariant 6y ago
      You're not quite thinking in the right direction. No matter the statistical model a 1/14 result, is absolute evidence against there being no infections at all. The problem lies with the test itself, which might have an unknown false positive rate. Although in this case we're basically looking at what I understand to be the gold standard in RNA/DNA evidence, combined with matching symptoms. Also apparently they had 2 separate teams testing the samples using different methodology, so we've got at least a decent amount of confidence that something is going on with that sample, although it doesn't rule out systematic bias.
      • icegreentea2 6y ago
        Yes. It's possible (I can't put a number on how likely) that the sample was mishandled and contamination introduced. Depending at what stage this occurred, this could affect all future tests of the sample. Ideally they are able to follow up with serological tests against the specific patient. While a positive carries no information (might have gotten COVID in the intervening time), a negative would point to some sort of sample contamination. This isn't a knock against their skill or their competence. Sometimes shit just happens. Certainly if this is true, I'd be very interested in how this changes the nature of our models of the virus.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Seems plausible. Wuhan is a very large city by any measure. Every large city of that scale must be exchanging people with all the other large cities, it's simply probability. You also have to figure that there's more virus than we can find, ie each patient found in Wuhan represents a fraction of infection cases. So chances are someone from Wuhan got it and spread it by flying to some other large city.
• ImaCake 6y ago
  Estimates for the most recent common ancestor point to mid January for France [0]. Of course these numbers could be wrong. But I suspect the level of surveillance of genomes allows for bioinformaticians to keep a close eye on what the virus is doing in a big picture evolution sense. They do note that while most samples are of `A2` strain virus (only meaningful at genotype level, not at phenotype) there were some samples from different genotype branches. Maybe their analysis finds the date for a later introduction of the virus which is different from the potential cryptic transmission occuring in late Dec? 0. http://virological.org/t/early-phylodynamics-analysis-of-the-covid-19-epidemics-in-france-using-194-genomes-april-10-2020/467 http://virological.org/t/early-phylodynamics-analysis-of-the...
  • makomk 6y ago
    Note that their "slow molecular clock" estimate gives a most recent common ancestor around the end of December. They reject this because it "finds a root which seems very early given the data". It's also, of course, possible that this particular cluster died out entirely, got genetically bottlenecked, or only ended up causing a small proportion of cases just through random chance.
• hokkos 6y ago
  They talk about potential false negative, but should have talked about potential false positive from sample cross contamination, because this isolated case seems in contradiction from everything we know about the french contamination history, a researcher that follow closely the phylogeny of the virus seems very dubious about that one. Now we need a sequence of the genome and serological test of the patient, the family and co-workers. Also this is not the first hospital to do that in France, IHU Méditerannée Infection, from Raoult and Chloroquine fame did that at the beginning of the epidemic in China, they tested 2500 samples from several month ago and found absolutely nothing.
  • skwb 6y ago
    French contamination history? I'm sure the French have modern microbiology and virology techniques... That said, I do agree that a seismological test of the patient would be more definitive, but sometimes you cannot contact the patient due to privacy concerns/ IRB rules. I don't know how French hospitals deal with patient data, but if it's anything like America, you are highly unlikely to be able to do those sort of things without additional approval.
    • jacquesm 6y ago
      Do you propose to shake the patients really bad?
      • troymc 6y ago
        I suspect they propose to detonate lots of small explosions at regular time intervals and at regular spacings on the surface of the patient, and then measure the responses using seismographs attached elsewhere to the patient, like what the oil companies do to produce maps of subsurface geology.
        • whatshisface 6y ago
          Well now you've gone full circle back to something reasonable, you're describing ultrasonic imaging.
• vondur 6y ago
  I'm sure this they case most everywhere where international travel is widespread. If the virus started spreading in China in November, then it most likely spread to most major international cities in December.
• Jugurtha 6y ago
  I was in Paris in November and saw nothing, but I was back in late January and I saw Asian people wearing masks in the airport and had the following thoughts: - Airborne - 8+ daily flights between Paris and Algiers on one company (8 others) - It's a matter of days if it's not already in Algiers. Went back to Algiers. I canceled meetings in Paris for February. Algeria had its first confirmed case on 25 February 2020 - an Italian national coming back from Italy, and no airport measures whatsoever at the time -. We established work from home for some teammates - who take public transportation - a few days later while we learn more about this as the risk/reward of not doing it was high and we transitioned to exclusively remote for everyone when it hit 17 confirmed cases in the country 4 March.
• busyant 6y ago
  I posted something (perhaps) related yesterday (https://fdafaers.blogspot.com/2020/05/adverse-events-cases-involving-drugs.html https://fdafaers.blogspot.com/2020/05/adverse-events-cases-i...). I looked at putative drug-related adverse event case reports submitted to the US FDA. Interestingly, there are 61 case reports that mention drugs used to treat "corona virus infection." 52 of those cases were filed in 2020. Oddly, 6 cases involved drugs used to treat "corona virus infection" in 2019 (all submitted in the US). My speculation was that those 6 cases were unrelated to SARS-CoV-2, but you never know. Here is the most relevant chart: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hrhtVnswxPI/Xq_7-HsE97I/AAAAAAABv3w/VkdCd9_Nl5gNjb2KSlf5RWe_ChQ78Nv4wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/corona1.jpg https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hrhtVnswxPI/Xq_7-HsE97I/AAAAAAABv...
  • netsharc 6y ago
    Well, the current virus is a type of coronavirus, old fashioned SARS and MERS are also caused by coronaviruses. They are so named because they have a crown (corona) shape.
    • Izkata 6y ago
      On top of that, somewhere around 20% of the "common cold" viruses are coronaviruses.
• CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  I wouldn’t put much weight on this. They looked at about 15 stored samples (actually 80 depending how you count) and got one positive. As far as I can tell that forms the entire factual evidence. Contamination/false positive works out to be a large concern. Clearly they wanted the result as well.
  • abtinf 6y ago
    No, that’s not the only evidence. The patient also presented with the relevant set of symptoms: “ He presented to the emergency ward on December 27 2019 with hemoptysis, cough, headache and fever, evolving for 4 days. Initial examination was unremarkable and the performed CT scan revealed bilateral ground glass opacity in inferior lobes”
    • tinus_hn 6y ago
      The CT scans could be checked with today’s knowledge. I presume they still have the images, right?
      • djsumdog 6y ago
        They're in the paper. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0924857920301643-gr3_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S09248579203016...
    • SiempreViernes 6y ago
      The symptoms of covid-19 are famously vague, and pneumonia isn't a unique condition.
  • forgotmylogin2 6y ago
    The patient presented with the exact symptoms of the virus, tested negative for other diseases that cause similar symptoms, and had two separate labs report the sample as positive for Covid. I'd say it's far more likely than not that this patient actually did have the virus. December 27th is not even a farfetched date to get the virus given that it was reportedly spreading in China in late November. > Clearly they wanted the result as well. Based on what? If anything, I'd say it's clear you don't want the result.
• ceedan 6y ago
  China's infections disease numbers for December 2019 were unbelievably higher than prior Decembers Dec 2017 - 700k cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-01/29/c_136933793.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-01/29/c_136933793.htm Dec 2018 - 712k cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/27/c_137778435.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/27/c_137778435.htm Dec 2019 - 1.71m cases - http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/01/c_138748020.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-02/01/c_138748020.htm
  • nabakin 6y ago
    Interesting. Influenza is a Class C disease. Dec 2017 - 93% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease. Dec 2018 - 93% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease. Dec 2019 - 98% of class C cases were infectious diarrhea, influenza, foot and mouth disease. Dec 2017 - 10 deaths were class C Dec 2018 - 16 deaths were class C Dec 2019 - 18 deaths were class C Maybe they've been misclassifying COVID-19 as influenza or this has to do with their misreporting.
    • adventured 6y ago
      > Maybe they've been misclassifying COVID-19 as influenza or this has to do with their misreporting. We know that most countries have made this mistake, even if their intentions are good. We know that every authoritarian nation has intentionally misrepresented Covid cases in extreme ways. Russia for example was aggressively lying about their cases, claiming hospitalizations were pneumonia early on and not Covid. Eventually Russia was unable to maintain the lies, which is what happened in China's case as well (the lie gets overwhelmed). Back in early January The Wall Street Journal caught China lying about Covid deaths, they were putting pneumonia on the death certificates when they knew it was Covid. http://archive.is/PkRF5 http://archive.is/PkRF5
  • knzhou 6y ago
    No, that's just how flu season works. The numbers in the US are also higher this year, and it normally ranges within a factor of ~4 from year to year depending on the dominant strains in circulation. [0] It's completely implausible that there were a million cases of COVID-19 in December. 0: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
• baby 6y ago
  I was in France in December/January, flied back to SF then to NYC for Real World Crypto 2020. I felt sick after flying back from France, got a really weird flu, similar to H1N1 back then. Flying back from NYC I remember being extremely sick in the plane... I'm convinced this was the coronavirus. Maybe I was patient 0 for both california and new york :|
  • safog 6y ago
    Get an antibody test?
    • baby 6y ago
      I'm waiting for them to become free, it's 150$ at the moment in SF.
• jweir 6y ago
  Caveat - this study may be wrong and needs to be verified. https://mobile.twitter.com/UNMC_DrKhan/status/1257440082019188745 https://mobile.twitter.com/UNMC_DrKhan/status/12574400820191...
• Bang2Bay 6y ago
  I remember seeing a similar story from sanfrancisco, california about their region.
• TeaVMFan 6y ago
  I know people in the US who thought they had COVID-19 in late December 2019. Until now the earliest proven cases were in February 2020. Are there any reports earlier than that now?
  • jdlyga 6y ago
    I work in Times Square, so I'd probably be one of the first to be exposed if anything came to the US early. I had a very weird flu back in late January. It wasn't serious, but I had a cough that wouldn't go away for a week afterwards.
• mrfusion 6y ago
  Remember all those articles about cats and dogs getting this? And even tigers. What ever happened with that?
• blackrock 6y ago
  This also just came out. This New Jersey mayor tested positive [1] for coronavirus antibodies. And he says he got sick in November 2019. Unless, the antibody test gave a false positive, and he did not get the virus. Then, how the hell did an American politician get the virus, before China even noticed it on their radar, and reported it to the W.H.O. in December 2019? This timeline also seems to coincide with CDC warnings of strange flu and pneumonia patterns late last year, with people having more difficult symptoms than normal. If you recall getting very sick late last year in 2019, then you should consider taking a coronavirus antibody test, to confirm whether you got the virus or not. [1] https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/04/nj-mayor-thinks-he-had-coronavirus-2-months-before-1st-confirmed-case-in-us.html https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/04/nj-mayor-thinks-he-ha...
• noirchen 6y ago
  Initially Chinese people treated it as flu, then they freaked out finding it to be SARS-like, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore set temperature checks. During the SARS outbreak, Asian countries run totally unprotected for months with only thousands of cases, and actually they were relieved to know that the CFR is much lower. But this time, the virus is much contagious. Actually many in China suspect that maybe a weak version has been around in SE Asia and China for years (remember that Malay pangolin?).
• haecceity 6y ago
  Interesting to see how people deal with this information given that mainstream media has instilled in us that the moral responsibility of the disease lies in China.
  • iKevinShah 6y ago
    > moral responsibility of the disease lies in China Is there a another opinion on this? It's where the virus originated (Lab created or from eating a bat or even US military doing it - whatever you are opting to believe) in November 2019 and it took them until late Jan 2020 to say that there's human to human transmission despite their own doctors warning and telling the world earlier than that (and they were silenced)
    • thinkharderdev 6y ago
      That is patently false. The CDC head was briefed by the Chinese "around New Year's Day" 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pa...). By Jan 7, 2020 the CDC had already setup a task force to deal with the COVID threat. I certainly don't want to defend the Chinese government. I'm sure there are a lot of things they did wrong (on top of all the horrendous human rights abuses they commit on a daily basis), but the whole narrative of blaming China for COVID seems like an obvious ploy to shit blame away from our own incompetent response. The fact of the matter is that we saw this coming in slow motion and comprehensively failed to respond in a way that could have prevented this human tragedy.
      • iKevinShah 6y ago
        Even if they knew, if they had themselves been moral and decided to stop all travel, it would've been fair to say we are all responsible. They did not do that. Sure all the countries are at fault too definitely (me, as an Indian, included) but doesnt take away the fact that Chinese authorities downplayed this and led to the spread. No matter how you put it and the moment it had spread world over, stopped flights to China to stop spread. Sorry, all governments are to blame here, for sure (these deaths cant be justified) but China and to a large extent WHO are in the blame here too. Majorly.
• mirimir 6y ago
  FYI: https://sci-hub.im/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 https://sci-hub.im/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.202...
• ur-whale 6y ago
  https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.106006 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.202...
• jupp0r 6y ago
  Seems dubious. Everything we know about the phylogenesis of SARS2 points to the origin being China. All RNA sequences that were published have been shown [1] to be mutations of earlier samples from Wuhan. If we would have had community transmission in France in late December, we would see that being a distinct branch in the genealogy. We don't see that, all RNA we've seen being sequenced in Europe is descended from China. [1] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
  • ahmedalsudani 6y ago
    IIRC, I read that we think it broke out into humans in November -- so this does not contradict Wuhan being the where this thing started.
  • hazeii 6y ago
    The detail is his wife worked at a supermarket near the main Paris airport, and had often had travellers (inc. from China) coming in, straight off the plane [0]. So one suggestion is she was caught it and was asymptomatic, and he caught it from her. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52526554 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52526554
  • not_a_moth 6y ago
    Why wouldn't this suggest to you it was spreading from China in December?
    • jupp0r 6y ago
      What happened to the strain of the virus? The previously known first case in France is this one [1]. If there was community transmission in France for a month, we should see different mutations than the ones in China. [1] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global?branchLabel=aa&dmax=2020-01-27&s=France/IDF0372/2020 https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global?branchLabel=aa&dmax=2020-...
      • not_a_moth 6y ago
        To be clear, the claim is if there was earlier community spread, the current virus in France should look different because of presumed mutation rates, because right now it looks similar to China?
• luka-birsa 6y ago
  As somebody living in Europe I find this data very interesting. We had a super strong flu season, which was incredibly contagious. This is the first year (in a decade) that everybody in my family got it. One kid first, then the other, then wife, then grandparents that were babysitting while wife was down. I'm the only one that didn't get it, but I was on travels during that time. Effects were mild on the kids, while the grandparents needed 14 days to recover. Wife lost sense of taste and smell. I really want to do a serological test for Covid just to see if we might have gone through it in January, when 0 cases were reported in our vicinity (Slovenia, which is next to Italy).
  • SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    > We had a super strong flu season, which was incredibly contagious. Same in UK, people were sick a lot of the time, October through December 2019. But that wasn't the COVID-19. It was just a bad colds and flu season.
    • gadders 6y ago
      Anecdata, but two people in my office had really persistent coughs in February, lasting multiple weeks, not days. I wonder if that was the Rona. One of the people that had it thinks it might have been.
      • SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
        > persistent coughs in February, That is more possible, both because of timing and symptoms. It's not certain (or even most likely) to be COVID-19, but is worth checking out. Given things like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52385558 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52385558 if someone _died_ on 6 Feb, they were infected in mid-late January.
      • koheripbal 6y ago
        Statistically speaking, it's still more likely that they had something else.
• flukus 6y ago
  How do we reconcile this with the known spread rate and lethality? If it was spreading around late December when lot's of people are traveling, seeing family and drinking over Christmas and New Years then where are the mass casualties? With a doubling time of 3 days and a morality rate of 1% a single person had it December 31st it would have infected a million people by around the end of February, killed approximately 10,000 and 150,000 would have been hospitalized by it. I've seen a lot of articles about how it may have been spreading earlier but none seem to account for the exponential growth.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• JVerstry 6y ago
  I am was on a mission in south-west France at that time and the local pharmacist told me around February she was convinced Covid was there since November 2019... She saw some of her customers having strong cases flu that would not go...
• libpcap 6y ago
  How many tourists did France have last year coming from the PRC?
• frr149 6y ago
  In Spain, there have been clear signs that mild cases of covid-19 where misdiagnosed as flu during January 2020, specially among children.
• mytailorisrich 6y ago
  That area (North side of Paris) is interesting and very important, I think. First that's where CDG airport is. This is the second largest airport in Europe by passenger traffic and the main gateway into Paris for tourists (not least Chinese tourists). Second, that's where Paris' Gare du Nord is. This is the largest train station in Europe by traffic, where trains from CDG airport arrive, and the start of high speed trains to London, Brussels, Amsterdam. So to me it's not surprising that this virus arrived there early. But it also means that the area should be monitored closely, not only by French authorities, but by British ones, etc. as well because any highly contagious disease that shows up there will be around Europe in no time.
• qwerty123457 6y ago
  If the virus jumped species naturally from bats, chances are transmission to humans happened more than once, through a long time period. There could very well be a less infectious, less severe strain circulating out there.