10 ms·

A little tin-foily, but I went to Vegas with my family in late December. About 2 weeks after we got back, my dad had a severe case of the flu (so far as we know

A little tin-foily, but I went to Vegas with my family in late December. About 2 weeks after we got back, my dad had a severe case of the flu (so far as we know) and so did my cousin's girlfriend. They were both showing symptoms similar to Covid-19, but because testing was not available then, it's hard to say for sure. And it was flu season then.

skwb 6y ago
Hopefully with the roll out of reliable antibody tests we can get the answers to these "mysterious flus" that lot of people anecdotally have. For me at least it would mentally comforting to know if the "flu" that I contracted after traveling to NOLA for Mardi Gras was in fact SARS-CoV-2.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are a few permutations of case, dashes etc. My wife presented with symptoms quite similar to covid-19 to A&E (UK: A&E ~= ER) after a cruise we went on in late November. She has never smoked but she did get quite breathless and shook it off after about a week. As you say, there are a lot of anecdotes. A decent antibody test would be nice but at the moment we don't know enough about how the bloody thing works. Even if you have detectable antibodies after an infection, does that mean you have any immunity to another infection and if so, for how long? My money is on this thing turning into another 'flu after about five years. It will stop killing large numbers of people and evolve into a sort of status quo, just like the seasonal 'flus. It will still be a killer but not quite so aggressive as it is now. It is not as aggressive a killer as Ebola but it spreads far easier. Evolution will ensure that it will find a "happy" medium where it can carry on spreading but we don't still feel the need to eradicate it because we can live with the consequences of the adjusted version. My language in the above para is a bit off but the sentiment is the same. We happily jump into cars every day (not so much now) and kill ourselves and others in pretty large numbers across the world but that is judged an acceptable risk. covid-19 will simply become another one eventually. For now, it is a right old shit show and we do not understand the enemy at all well. We do not know how to live with it. We will.
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    "Evolution", evolution takes multiple generations, we won't "evolve" to deal with that anytime soon. There's no reason it will be less of a killer for people that get infected. What we can do is as you say, for now, learn to live with it, and hope for a vaccine.
    - foota 6y ago
      They mean the virus itself. Viruses that are too lethal can't spread as effectively because they cripple the host and are easily detected. This creates selective pressure for viruses which mutate to be less lethal to spread more widely. If the less lethal virus confers immunity to the more lethal version then the lethal version is likely to die off, or at least become less prominent.
      - gerdesj 6y ago
        Nicely put. This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things. I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years. It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope) My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
        groby_b 6y ago
        We were not "all unprepared for this". That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this. As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another. As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu. So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away. And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)
rkho 6y ago
Same, I also went to Vegas in late December and caught something; it was absolutely the worst flu I had ever experienced.
- DougN7 6y ago
  My kids in Idaho (that had visited Southern Utah not too far from Vegas) and all the symptoms of COVID-19 back in November. I guess quite a few people did. They were tested for flu and it came back negative, but breathing was hard. Guess we’ll never know.
  - pwned1 6y ago
    Quest labs now offers the antibody test to anyone for $120.
    - DougN7 6y ago
      Cool! Thanks for the info
chrisbrandow 6y ago
pretty reasonable thing to wonder, honestly.
6nf 6y ago
There's loads of reports like yours from LA too, if you get tested for antibodies I would not be surprised if you tested positive. You might well have been an asymptomatic carrier.
- newacct583 6y ago
  With all respect, that's terrible analysis. The epidemiology is really clear that the start of the US epidemics was around January. It's not impossible that there were people with the disease early, but we know with absolute certainty that this number was very, very small. Because if it weren't, we'd see it in incontrovertible evidence like the death curves, and we don't. People who were sick in December (I mean, be real: a lot of people were sick in December!) are overwhelmingly more likely to have had the flu than a disease that even in Wuhan was at just a few thousand cases at most.
  - 6nf 6y ago
    > The epidemiology is really clear that the start of the US epidemics was around January. That's what they said in France too before this new study
    - newacct583 6y ago
      Yes, but that doesn't mean everyone who got sick in France in December had covid!
findyoucef 6y ago
The first known case of Covid in Colorado was tied to a Vegas conference.
matthewowen 6y ago
1) flu symptoms aren't the same as covid19 symptoms 2) most tests come back negative, despite generally being limited to people with symptoms 3) other coronaviruses have similar symptoms. It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December.
- matwood 6y ago
  > It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December. I think this needs to be repeated more often. Everyone who had a sniffle in the last 6 months thinks they had COVID-19. There are always a lot of different diseases going around in the winter.
  - tapland 6y ago
    That's why they don't think they had it, but are wondering if they could have. You are reading things into other peoples statements and dismissing them because of your own mistake.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    Yeah, but a lot of people have had covid-19 so there's nothing strange in wondering that.
- kevinpet 6y ago
  Because it wasn't going around Las Vegas? Which we know because people haven't been tested for it? And so he shouldn't get tested to see if what he had was covid?
  - matthewowen 6y ago
    No, he shouldn't. What would be the point? We don't even know if having had it grants future immunity. But beyond that, this trend I've seen of people thinking they had it because they had the sniffles is dangerous if it makes them think they're now somehow safe. If we learn that people who've had it have resistance then we should all get tested, capacity allowing. Having had a cold at some point is almost irrelevant, because it seems that most carriers are asymptomatic, and that most people with mild covid19-like symptoms don't actually have it. The predictive value really isn't that high.
gwbas1c 6y ago
There were a lot of nasty viruses going around that are easily mistaken for Covid-19. I've had two viruses this winter that lasted a very long time. Most likely neither were Covid-19, even though one lasted a very long time and made me very sick.
Diesel555 6y ago
I live in Vegas, I'm pretty sure it swept through a few months ago. Before people were testing for it. We had deaths from people testing negative for the Flu and everyone I knew got sick in about a 2 week period (we are <40).

skwb 6y ago

Hopefully with the roll out of reliable antibody tests we can get the answers to these "mysterious flus" that lot of people anecdotally have. For me at least it would mentally comforting to know if the "flu" that I contracted after traveling to NOLA for Mardi Gras was in fact SARS-CoV-2.

gerdesj 6y ago
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are a few permutations of case, dashes etc. My wife presented with symptoms quite similar to covid-19 to A&E (UK: A&E ~= ER) after a cruise we went on in late November. She has never smoked but she did get quite breathless and shook it off after about a week. As you say, there are a lot of anecdotes. A decent antibody test would be nice but at the moment we don't know enough about how the bloody thing works. Even if you have detectable antibodies after an infection, does that mean you have any immunity to another infection and if so, for how long? My money is on this thing turning into another 'flu after about five years. It will stop killing large numbers of people and evolve into a sort of status quo, just like the seasonal 'flus. It will still be a killer but not quite so aggressive as it is now. It is not as aggressive a killer as Ebola but it spreads far easier. Evolution will ensure that it will find a "happy" medium where it can carry on spreading but we don't still feel the need to eradicate it because we can live with the consequences of the adjusted version. My language in the above para is a bit off but the sentiment is the same. We happily jump into cars every day (not so much now) and kill ourselves and others in pretty large numbers across the world but that is judged an acceptable risk. covid-19 will simply become another one eventually. For now, it is a right old shit show and we do not understand the enemy at all well. We do not know how to live with it. We will.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  "Evolution", evolution takes multiple generations, we won't "evolve" to deal with that anytime soon. There's no reason it will be less of a killer for people that get infected. What we can do is as you say, for now, learn to live with it, and hope for a vaccine.
  - foota 6y ago
    They mean the virus itself. Viruses that are too lethal can't spread as effectively because they cripple the host and are easily detected. This creates selective pressure for viruses which mutate to be less lethal to spread more widely. If the less lethal virus confers immunity to the more lethal version then the lethal version is likely to die off, or at least become less prominent.
    - gerdesj 6y ago
      Nicely put. This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things. I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years. It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope) My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
      - groby_b 6y ago
        We were not "all unprepared for this". That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this. As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another. As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu. So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away. And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)

rkho 6y ago

Same, I also went to Vegas in late December and caught something; it was absolutely the worst flu I had ever experienced.

DougN7 6y ago
My kids in Idaho (that had visited Southern Utah not too far from Vegas) and all the symptoms of COVID-19 back in November. I guess quite a few people did. They were tested for flu and it came back negative, but breathing was hard. Guess we’ll never know.
- pwned1 6y ago
  Quest labs now offers the antibody test to anyone for $120.
  - DougN7 6y ago
    Cool! Thanks for the info

chrisbrandow 6y ago

pretty reasonable thing to wonder, honestly.

6nf 6y ago

There's loads of reports like yours from LA too, if you get tested for antibodies I would not be surprised if you tested positive. You might well have been an asymptomatic carrier.

newacct583 6y ago
With all respect, that's terrible analysis. The epidemiology is really clear that the start of the US epidemics was around January. It's not impossible that there were people with the disease early, but we know with absolute certainty that this number was very, very small. Because if it weren't, we'd see it in incontrovertible evidence like the death curves, and we don't. People who were sick in December (I mean, be real: a lot of people were sick in December!) are overwhelmingly more likely to have had the flu than a disease that even in Wuhan was at just a few thousand cases at most.
- 6nf 6y ago
  > The epidemiology is really clear that the start of the US epidemics was around January. That's what they said in France too before this new study
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Yes, but that doesn't mean everyone who got sick in France in December had covid!

findyoucef 6y ago

The first known case of Covid in Colorado was tied to a Vegas conference.

matthewowen 6y ago

1) flu symptoms aren't the same as covid19 symptoms 2) most tests come back negative, despite generally being limited to people with symptoms 3) other coronaviruses have similar symptoms. It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December.

matwood 6y ago
> It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December. I think this needs to be repeated more often. Everyone who had a sniffle in the last 6 months thinks they had COVID-19. There are always a lot of different diseases going around in the winter.
- tapland 6y ago
  That's why they don't think they had it, but are wondering if they could have. You are reading things into other peoples statements and dismissing them because of your own mistake.
- Kiro 6y ago
  Yeah, but a lot of people have had covid-19 so there's nothing strange in wondering that.
kevinpet 6y ago
Because it wasn't going around Las Vegas? Which we know because people haven't been tested for it? And so he shouldn't get tested to see if what he had was covid?
- matthewowen 6y ago
  No, he shouldn't. What would be the point? We don't even know if having had it grants future immunity. But beyond that, this trend I've seen of people thinking they had it because they had the sniffles is dangerous if it makes them think they're now somehow safe. If we learn that people who've had it have resistance then we should all get tested, capacity allowing. Having had a cold at some point is almost irrelevant, because it seems that most carriers are asymptomatic, and that most people with mild covid19-like symptoms don't actually have it. The predictive value really isn't that high.

gwbas1c 6y ago

There were a lot of nasty viruses going around that are easily mistaken for Covid-19. I've had two viruses this winter that lasted a very long time. Most likely neither were Covid-19, even though one lasted a very long time and made me very sick.

Diesel555 6y ago

I live in Vegas, I'm pretty sure it swept through a few months ago. Before people were testing for it. We had deaths from people testing negative for the Flu and everyone I knew got sick in about a 2 week period (we are <40).