7 ms·

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 s

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.
- ericb 6y ago
  My wife had something similar at about that time. I'm curious. Did yours turn into pneumonia within 48 hours? Did you have severe trouble breathing? She's getting the antibody test this week. She had also just been to a meeting with international (especially French) people the week before.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Same for me back in early February. When you think about it, how many people just ride out flu-like symptoms, and how many doctors order official test to confirm influenza? It’s possible this virus was in stealth mode all over the place for awhile last year.
- simonh 6y ago
  Most likely yes, I've had really severely bad flu twice in my life, it happens. Conversely my wife is a Nurse and she contracted Cov-19, confirmed by a test in early April, but fortunately it was a mild case, recovered ok and she's fine now just with a mild cough.
makomk 6y ago
On the other hand, if I remember rightly some researchers tested a whole bunch of people who thought they had Corona-like symptoms in that time period using antibody tests, and didn't find a single case.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Yeah, there's been a couple of bad colds going around, and there's not much suggestion of excess death prior to the Jan-Feb-Mar spread of SARS-CoV-2.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
There is actually a plenty of "cousin" coronaviruses around, they are just not that dangerous. 15% of all common colds are caused by them. it might actually explain why some poorer countries appear to have lesser incidence of Covid - people catch cold there more often than in the first world. These "nicer" viruses might provide some immunity (not epidemiologist though).
- DownGoat 6y ago
  Some virologists suggest that the common cold corona viruses that are endemic, might have been deadly when novel, and caused similar pandemics, but mutated to something less dangerous over time.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    I've wondered that too. What if in human pre-history (10,000+ years ago) modern rhinoviruses and coronaviruses that cause common colds, were once terribly deadly. We could just be the descendants of survivors who evolved immune systems that were able to deal with these viruses? One of the techniques of trying to make vaccines is to attenuate it by exposing to to different hosts; so that it will mutate into a form that's less harmful to humans; kinda the opposite of what probably happened here, where a virus that was not deadly to either bats or pangolins but caused havoc when it got to us.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      SARS-2 isn't particularly dangerous for children. Most of them don't even have symptoms. Maybe all of our cold-causing coronaviruses are deadly when they present for the first time to an adult but since we all get them as children, our immune systems are better prepared.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      It need not even be pre-historical. Until indoor plumbing, germ theory, and modern medicine in general, infectious diseases were one of the few remaining modes of natural selection that humanity couldn't control. The usual solutions to nature's challenges like increasing density to allow for specialization and economies of scale or trading with neighbors just made the problem worse. Given how many people died due to the introduction of diseases to the Americas and the black plague in Europe, infectious diseases have definitely been a powerful driver of our evolution in the common era, let alone 10,000+ years ago.
ahurmazda 6y ago
My anec-story is from ~Nov 1. BA resident. Sickest in my life. At the ER with 106F (did not know it even went there) fever and bad cough. Complete delirium. Flu result came back negative. No sepsis either. Released with anti-pneumonia antibiotics. Fever > 105F persisted for at least 6-7 days. Coughing that was bad enough to cause spasm. Took a second round of antibiotics (21 days total) to get over the pneumonia. The doc remarked about my chest x-ray ("whoa what is that?!!") but could not give a good explanation.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  can you get tested for the antibodies, that's much earlier than other infections (Nov 1). Of course you could have gotten it in a later infection that wasn't so noteworthy.
- A-Train 6y ago
  Top 10 things I don't want my doctor to say. Honorable mentions: "whoa what is that"...
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    Another for the list: "Do you know how high your heart-rate was?" (said with childish glee).
    - cjcampbell 6y ago
      “Be right back. The other doctors will want to see this.” - response to a power tool injury
      - marvin 6y ago
        "Wow. Do you mind if I call in our resident have a look at you? This is a great case study."
  - xtracto 6y ago
    When I came back from a California trip to my hometown in Mexico, I got something nasty with the typical symptoms: fever, shortness of breath, dry cough, etc etc. I went to the ER and got x-ray and blood samples. When my doctor arrived, he was all cool. Then he asked me a bunch of questions and went to see the x-ray and blood work result in the labs. After taking some time, when he came back, he had a face mask and a can of Lysol. He said he had been delayed filling an epidemiological report. That's the moment when I knew it was bad haha.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
Pneumonia deaths had an unexpected surge in Italy October 2019. A lot of people in this thread an to be clutching at the assumption it couldn't possibly have been anywhere else before it was detected. One case in France not spreading is fairly lucky if it's true. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-timing/italian-scientists-investigate-possible-earlier-emergence-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN21D2IG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  Not so much "clutching at the assumption" as saying "that sounds very unlikely given the genetic tracing we have so far showing the path of the virus".
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    Plenty of refutations of this if you read through this thread. The onus is very much upon those who claim it's not realistic or a false positive. Ball is in your court. Keen to hear a response.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Are they able to exhume these dead people, and test them for the coronavirus antibodies? October 2019 is even earlier than the earliest known cases.
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    No they aren't from what I understand. Virtually no one dying from covid19 was considered out of the ordinary for many countries, even well after it was established in Asia.
    - blackrock 6y ago
      Dig them up! I want the truth!
un_montagnard 6y ago
I coughed like never before between late July to mid-December 2019.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  From that one line alone that sounds like a textbook description of "the hundred day cough", also known as "whooping cough" or pertussis.
busterarm 6y ago
NYC resident. I had two back-to-back sinus/chest infections in Late December/Early Jan. Worst illnesses I've had in years. Spent almost a month at home. I was healthy for all of four or five days in between. Coincidentally, I got sick after several of my coworkers/close friends returned from trips to China.
cblum 6y ago
I posted my anecdote here the other day if anyone’s interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22959688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22959688
OrgNet 6y ago
Get the antibody test done everyone, as soon as possible
code_duck 6y ago
For my anecdote, I got sick for the first time in years with a cold, right around the new year. This happened after we went out to eat at a restaurant in Portland. Our food was late, and someone came and told us that some kitchen workers had called in sick. We ended up waiting almost 2 hours for our food. After eating, my girlfriend and I felt sick within a day. It was fairly miserable and lasted about 10 days. Then a month later, after my roommate returned from a trip to Vancouver, BC, we both became ill. This time it lasted about a week. Next, about a month and a half later I was feeling unwell for weeks with very different symptoms. I went to urgent care. This turned out to be an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis, and I was diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes.
dwd 6y ago
I've posted this a couple of times, and while based mostly on my own anecdotal experience and basic research (I am not an epidemiologist), it still seems to fit the pattern of evidence gradually coming out. There were a spike in bacterial pneumonia cases in regional Australian hospitals in the middle of summer prior to the known outbreak. I know of 1/2 dozen people (including myself) who caught some highly contagious non-flu virus and had varying symptoms. One person developed pneumonia but tested negative for both the flu and SARS-CoV-2 at the time - which was how I heard about the spike in hospitalisations. My pet theory is that someone infected with the milder version was co-infected with the bat originated virus in Wuhan resulting in a highly contagious version that can cause COVID-19. Whether they worked in the lab or got it from the market is a matter of debate. I'm thinking lab as the market didn't have bats and patient zero didn't go to the market, while the lab did have bats at some point. There was a serious effort to hide the evidence which makes it all the more suspicious. There was evidence of a human-specific immune response mutation which could indicate it was neither manufactured or required an intermediary host. What I think we have to be careful of is that the milder version doesn't provide immunity for the more dangerous one.
ryoshu 6y ago
Anecdote: Metro NYC area. First week of March something weird ripped through my household. Wife lost all sense of taste and smell - complained she couldn't taste my cooking - and had a pretty bad cold. Kids and wife got weird pink eye at the same time with pink rings around their eyes. I was very lethargic during the same period of time and when I would lay down would get waves of chills through my body. No clue if it was COVID-19, but it was strange. And we're ground zero for it (I work in Manhattan and used to commute every day on public transit).
- drewcon 6y ago
  Those are all C19 symptoms. Get an antibody test and find out!
- 2sk21 6y ago
  This is almost exactly what happened in my household. I am also in the NYC metro area. Kids had very mild symptoms, wife lost her sense of smell and I had fever/chills for a few days. I tested positive for covid but thankfully it appears to have been a relatively mild case.
- qwerty123457 6y ago
  You're probably one of the only posters on this thread who actually had the coronavirus :)
rabuse 6y ago
I had the "flu", which started out different than any other sickness I've ever had. Started with a dry cough out of nowhere, and no sore throat/stuffiness, and then the horrible fever set in with an awful cough.
vmception 6y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if a mild version of the virus had spread throught he world earlier than the current pandemic or another seasonal infection that is normally benign is going around. Sars-Cov-2 debilitates linings of the lungs and other organs and the immune system and blood cell oxygen transport efficiency all at once But if nothing takes advantage of that then nothing happens, and you heal before something does happen. With HIV we studied it in reverse: we saw people were dying of benign illnesses and then discovered they had been infected with this other virus for a decade. This first exposure to HIV presents itself as a flu/fever until it is sufficiently surpressed by the immune system and takes a decade of iterative mutations to bypass the immune system. With COVID19 a similar result happens within a week, but we aren't really looking at which bacteria or viruses could have been benign that may also be present. Not that complicated, just no bandwidth to figure it out yet. But if you follow this rabbit hole, it could easily suggest that in late fall 2019 there were just few people that had Sars-Cov-2 and they either statistically were not getting exposed to the opportunistic infections, or a seasonal benign opportunistic infection was not running in conjunction that season. This notion has been vehemently rejected by people over the past month, but it looks like people might be a little more open to it. Maybe the right people will begin to entertain the hypothesis.

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.
ericb 6y ago
My wife had something similar at about that time. I'm curious. Did yours turn into pneumonia within 48 hours? Did you have severe trouble breathing? She's getting the antibody test this week. She had also just been to a meeting with international (especially French) people the week before.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Same for me back in early February. When you think about it, how many people just ride out flu-like symptoms, and how many doctors order official test to confirm influenza? It’s possible this virus was in stealth mode all over the place for awhile last year.
simonh 6y ago
Most likely yes, I've had really severely bad flu twice in my life, it happens. Conversely my wife is a Nurse and she contracted Cov-19, confirmed by a test in early April, but fortunately it was a mild case, recovered ok and she's fine now just with a mild cough.

makomk 6y ago

On the other hand, if I remember rightly some researchers tested a whole bunch of people who thought they had Corona-like symptoms in that time period using antibody tests, and didn't find a single case.

maxerickson 6y ago
Yeah, there's been a couple of bad colds going around, and there's not much suggestion of excess death prior to the Jan-Feb-Mar spread of SARS-CoV-2.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

There is actually a plenty of "cousin" coronaviruses around, they are just not that dangerous. 15% of all common colds are caused by them. it might actually explain why some poorer countries appear to have lesser incidence of Covid - people catch cold there more often than in the first world. These "nicer" viruses might provide some immunity (not epidemiologist though).

DownGoat 6y ago
Some virologists suggest that the common cold corona viruses that are endemic, might have been deadly when novel, and caused similar pandemics, but mutated to something less dangerous over time.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  I've wondered that too. What if in human pre-history (10,000+ years ago) modern rhinoviruses and coronaviruses that cause common colds, were once terribly deadly. We could just be the descendants of survivors who evolved immune systems that were able to deal with these viruses? One of the techniques of trying to make vaccines is to attenuate it by exposing to to different hosts; so that it will mutate into a form that's less harmful to humans; kinda the opposite of what probably happened here, where a virus that was not deadly to either bats or pangolins but caused havoc when it got to us.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    SARS-2 isn't particularly dangerous for children. Most of them don't even have symptoms. Maybe all of our cold-causing coronaviruses are deadly when they present for the first time to an adult but since we all get them as children, our immune systems are better prepared.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    It need not even be pre-historical. Until indoor plumbing, germ theory, and modern medicine in general, infectious diseases were one of the few remaining modes of natural selection that humanity couldn't control. The usual solutions to nature's challenges like increasing density to allow for specialization and economies of scale or trading with neighbors just made the problem worse. Given how many people died due to the introduction of diseases to the Americas and the black plague in Europe, infectious diseases have definitely been a powerful driver of our evolution in the common era, let alone 10,000+ years ago.

ahurmazda 6y ago

My anec-story is from ~Nov 1. BA resident. Sickest in my life. At the ER with 106F (did not know it even went there) fever and bad cough. Complete delirium. Flu result came back negative. No sepsis either. Released with anti-pneumonia antibiotics. Fever > 105F persisted for at least 6-7 days. Coughing that was bad enough to cause spasm. Took a second round of antibiotics (21 days total) to get over the pneumonia. The doc remarked about my chest x-ray ("whoa what is that?!!") but could not give a good explanation.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
can you get tested for the antibodies, that's much earlier than other infections (Nov 1). Of course you could have gotten it in a later infection that wasn't so noteworthy.
A-Train 6y ago
Top 10 things I don't want my doctor to say. Honorable mentions: "whoa what is that"...
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Another for the list: "Do you know how high your heart-rate was?" (said with childish glee).
  - cjcampbell 6y ago
    “Be right back. The other doctors will want to see this.” - response to a power tool injury
    - marvin 6y ago
      "Wow. Do you mind if I call in our resident have a look at you? This is a great case study."
- xtracto 6y ago
  When I came back from a California trip to my hometown in Mexico, I got something nasty with the typical symptoms: fever, shortness of breath, dry cough, etc etc. I went to the ER and got x-ray and blood samples. When my doctor arrived, he was all cool. Then he asked me a bunch of questions and went to see the x-ray and blood work result in the labs. After taking some time, when he came back, he had a face mask and a can of Lysol. He said he had been delayed filling an epidemiological report. That's the moment when I knew it was bad haha.

DarthGhandi 6y ago

Pneumonia deaths had an unexpected surge in Italy October 2019. A lot of people in this thread an to be clutching at the assumption it couldn't possibly have been anywhere else before it was detected. One case in France not spreading is fairly lucky if it's true. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-timing/italian-scientists-investigate-possible-earlier-emergence-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN21D2IG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...

lazyasciiart 6y ago
Not so much "clutching at the assumption" as saying "that sounds very unlikely given the genetic tracing we have so far showing the path of the virus".
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Plenty of refutations of this if you read through this thread. The onus is very much upon those who claim it's not realistic or a false positive. Ball is in your court. Keen to hear a response.
blackrock 6y ago
Are they able to exhume these dead people, and test them for the coronavirus antibodies? October 2019 is even earlier than the earliest known cases.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  No they aren't from what I understand. Virtually no one dying from covid19 was considered out of the ordinary for many countries, even well after it was established in Asia.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    Dig them up! I want the truth!

un_montagnard 6y ago

I coughed like never before between late July to mid-December 2019.

saalweachter 6y ago
From that one line alone that sounds like a textbook description of "the hundred day cough", also known as "whooping cough" or pertussis.

busterarm 6y ago

NYC resident. I had two back-to-back sinus/chest infections in Late December/Early Jan. Worst illnesses I've had in years. Spent almost a month at home. I was healthy for all of four or five days in between. Coincidentally, I got sick after several of my coworkers/close friends returned from trips to China.

cblum 6y ago

I posted my anecdote here the other day if anyone’s interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22959688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22959688

OrgNet 6y ago

Get the antibody test done everyone, as soon as possible

code_duck 6y ago

For my anecdote, I got sick for the first time in years with a cold, right around the new year. This happened after we went out to eat at a restaurant in Portland. Our food was late, and someone came and told us that some kitchen workers had called in sick. We ended up waiting almost 2 hours for our food. After eating, my girlfriend and I felt sick within a day. It was fairly miserable and lasted about 10 days. Then a month later, after my roommate returned from a trip to Vancouver, BC, we both became ill. This time it lasted about a week. Next, about a month and a half later I was feeling unwell for weeks with very different symptoms. I went to urgent care. This turned out to be an episode of diabetic ketoacidosis, and I was diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes.

dwd 6y ago

I've posted this a couple of times, and while based mostly on my own anecdotal experience and basic research (I am not an epidemiologist), it still seems to fit the pattern of evidence gradually coming out. There were a spike in bacterial pneumonia cases in regional Australian hospitals in the middle of summer prior to the known outbreak. I know of 1/2 dozen people (including myself) who caught some highly contagious non-flu virus and had varying symptoms. One person developed pneumonia but tested negative for both the flu and SARS-CoV-2 at the time - which was how I heard about the spike in hospitalisations. My pet theory is that someone infected with the milder version was co-infected with the bat originated virus in Wuhan resulting in a highly contagious version that can cause COVID-19. Whether they worked in the lab or got it from the market is a matter of debate. I'm thinking lab as the market didn't have bats and patient zero didn't go to the market, while the lab did have bats at some point. There was a serious effort to hide the evidence which makes it all the more suspicious. There was evidence of a human-specific immune response mutation which could indicate it was neither manufactured or required an intermediary host. What I think we have to be careful of is that the milder version doesn't provide immunity for the more dangerous one.

ryoshu 6y ago

Anecdote: Metro NYC area. First week of March something weird ripped through my household. Wife lost all sense of taste and smell - complained she couldn't taste my cooking - and had a pretty bad cold. Kids and wife got weird pink eye at the same time with pink rings around their eyes. I was very lethargic during the same period of time and when I would lay down would get waves of chills through my body. No clue if it was COVID-19, but it was strange. And we're ground zero for it (I work in Manhattan and used to commute every day on public transit).

drewcon 6y ago
Those are all C19 symptoms. Get an antibody test and find out!
2sk21 6y ago
This is almost exactly what happened in my household. I am also in the NYC metro area. Kids had very mild symptoms, wife lost her sense of smell and I had fever/chills for a few days. I tested positive for covid but thankfully it appears to have been a relatively mild case.
qwerty123457 6y ago
You're probably one of the only posters on this thread who actually had the coronavirus :)

rabuse 6y ago

I had the "flu", which started out different than any other sickness I've ever had. Started with a dry cough out of nowhere, and no sore throat/stuffiness, and then the horrible fever set in with an awful cough.

vmception 6y ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if a mild version of the virus had spread throught he world earlier than the current pandemic or another seasonal infection that is normally benign is going around. Sars-Cov-2 debilitates linings of the lungs and other organs and the immune system and blood cell oxygen transport efficiency all at once But if nothing takes advantage of that then nothing happens, and you heal before something does happen. With HIV we studied it in reverse: we saw people were dying of benign illnesses and then discovered they had been infected with this other virus for a decade. This first exposure to HIV presents itself as a flu/fever until it is sufficiently surpressed by the immune system and takes a decade of iterative mutations to bypass the immune system. With COVID19 a similar result happens within a week, but we aren't really looking at which bacteria or viruses could have been benign that may also be present. Not that complicated, just no bandwidth to figure it out yet. But if you follow this rabbit hole, it could easily suggest that in late fall 2019 there were just few people that had Sars-Cov-2 and they either statistically were not getting exposed to the opportunistic infections, or a seasonal benign opportunistic infection was not running in conjunction that season. This notion has been vehemently rejected by people over the past month, but it looks like people might be a little more open to it. Maybe the right people will begin to entertain the hypothesis.