8 ms·

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

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.
    - gadders 6y ago
      No doubt. But that applies to anyone who has cold or flu like symptoms.
- ageitgey 6y ago
  I can add one data point to support this (not that it is worth much). I had the normal story of being sick in January in London with the "worst flu ever" and suspected it might have been COVID. But I recently had a lab-based IgG antibody test and it came back negative. Everyone else in my family was also negative. Also, friends who have family members who work in the NHS with similar stories of being sick were also negative. No one I know directly has tested positive yet. I can't speak to the overall accuracy of the test, but the one I took was the private IgG antibody offered through the company 'Qured'.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Another random datapoint. I had covid according to a PCR test and it was pretty much a non event - slight sore throat only. I think unless you get the full can't breath thing it's very hard to tell.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Correct - and it was the same in the US. Strong flu season. ...and tests confirmed that it was the "regular" seasonal flu - not covid-19. People want to believe that covid-19 has already worked its way through the entire community because they want to believe that this is almost over. The data does not support that position.
  - lymeeducator 6y ago
    We do not have the data to support or refute the original statement. Mostly because the US has a poor understanding of the uniqueness and context of every person's immune system and how it plays a role in new viruses, reactivating old viruses, depleting nutrition required to successfully fight off multiple strains through the winter season, having multiple pathogens at once and a suppressed immune system, etc. This lack of understanding requires a lot more testing of pathogens, T-cells, mast cells, and signaling (cytokines, etc) from a lot of people. It's usually seen as too costly or invasive. Not that this current pandemic has been costly ;-) In the US Midwest it was very harsh for flu, conjunctivitis, strep, etc. My children both had coughs, fever, ruptured right ear and one had chicken pox style rash (late December). Doctors never tested my son, my daughter tested negative for flu with multi-day symptoms and then positive for flu A (same test) ~10 days later. So there is/was a definite lack of data. Unfortunately, we do not have the samples to go back in time and apply newer tests. Luckily, France had the foresight to preserve some of the samples.
    - amalter 6y ago
      Why not get a serological test? They are being offered inexpensively at least here in NYC by commercial urgent care facilities. I expect the mail-in Labs will get geared up pretty quickly also.
      - lymeeducator 6y ago
        Antibody tests are becoming more available. So that's an option for me and possibly my young children when I can afford to pay for it.
TomMarius 6y ago
Same in CZ, I had the baddest flu in January, I even went to have a covid test now, but I still didn't have it
- iso947 6y ago
  Antibody year? How accurate are they at an individual level?
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    Highly depends on the test, some are very susceptible to false positives from other coronaviruses. PCR tests have high false negative rates, but low false positive.
- smcl 6y ago
  I had a horrific one in January too, the first time I've ever been ill enough to get a neschopenka.
Giorgi 6y ago
Wishful thinking. It was h1n1. If there was also breathing problems reported - then we are talking
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  +1 this “i had the worst flu” meme needs to die - nobody was stockpiling dead bodies in mobile refrigerators in jan as far as i recall
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Your statement isn't logical. Disease spread tends to always show a pretty standard shape. It was that observation (Farr's law) that led to epidemiology being born as a field. It grows, it peaks, it enters immediate decline. Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. We know now that this virus has left hospitals virtually everywhere without overload, even in places like Sweden. A few other places were hit much harder. But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. It's apparently some kind of invention of New York policymakers during a brief peak rather than a worldwide phenomenon. A virus can be spreading and growing for a long time before it attracts attention. The evidence keeps mounting that the first reports in Wuhan were not in fact the first cases after COVID had mutated or crossed from animals but merely the first where doctors decided to search for a novel virus after coming under pressure and noticing some novel symptoms. What you saw in New York was a mix of: 1. Conditions at the absolute peak of infection, not at the start. 2. Media hype and fake news. For (2) I present https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-fr... as evidence. CNBC spliced video from an ICU in Italy into reports about New York without telling anyone. Outright deliberate deception is also the tip of an iceberg: there's far more selective reporting, exaggerated anecdotes and so on. On April 6th Vox reported the entire USA was running out of sedatives needed for ventilation: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-ventilators-drug-shortage-sedatives-covid-19 https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-v... On the same day Gov Cuomo was saying they had enough ventilators with some in reserve. A few days later he was sending them to other parts of the USA. Whatever you think you know about the situation in New York you really only have a tiny fragment of the whole picture (and the same for me and everyone else posting here). Our understand of reality lies shattered in pieces on the floor, smashed by speed, poor quality data, poor use of data, and extremely poor journalism. All we can do is work to piece together a narrative of what really happened by examining all the evidence we can get. Repeated anecdotes from many different people about having had a COVID-like illness before it was being discussed much are interesting for that reason.
ainiriand 6y ago
It might sound absurd, but here in Ireland everyone in the office got a strong cold early February, including me and my wife. Also my mum back in north Spain and my brother in the Canary Islands got sick as well. It is very interesting the fact that I have never seen my brother sick in some 30 years and we talk almost every day.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  There are still more people with other colds & flus than covid-19. Being sick today, still likely means you have something OTHER than covid-19
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    Yep. Even in peak coronona over 90% of tests come back negative for covid-19.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alkonaut 6y ago
I keep hearing this. I also had the worst cold in 10 years easily, this january. My kids were unaffected but me and the wife had 40 deg fevers and muscle pains for days. The whole family took the seasonal flu vaccine (not sure if it was the correct one this year). What seems to indicate that it wasn't Covid was that at the same time as all of us had that monster flu in january, the hospitals weren't filling up with people who couldn't breathe.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The hospitals are filling up with cases of viral pneumonia every year, at the beginning there would have been nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a bad flu season.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    And by late February and early March when medical professionals were hunting for signs of the novel coronavirus and people were about to start being hospitalised and dying in large numbers, there'd be an enormous amount of hospital inpatients with respiratory symptoms to test. We know this wasn't the case until later...
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      That's a fallacy. At any point in time, there will be patients showing up with viral pneumonia in the hospitals, with some seasonal variance. For there to be a discernible difference here, you need a "critical mass" of cases. How many such cases are necessary depends on the incidence of severe cases vs non-severe cases, but we do not know the amount of non-severe cases, because we did not test everyone. Antibody studies suggest that there are 10x as many cases as reported. If that is true, then there could have been hundreds of thousands of cases that went undetected along with some more severe cases that were labeled as "viral pneumonia". The different rates of infection in different countries may well have more to do with the amount of testing than the actual infection rate.
  - jwandborg 6y ago
Tepix 6y ago
Just to provide a counter point: Noone in my family got the flu this winter. I have one friend who got it (and it was bad) but that's the only one i know of.

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.
  - gadders 6y ago
    No doubt. But that applies to anyone who has cold or flu like symptoms.
ageitgey 6y ago
I can add one data point to support this (not that it is worth much). I had the normal story of being sick in January in London with the "worst flu ever" and suspected it might have been COVID. But I recently had a lab-based IgG antibody test and it came back negative. Everyone else in my family was also negative. Also, friends who have family members who work in the NHS with similar stories of being sick were also negative. No one I know directly has tested positive yet. I can't speak to the overall accuracy of the test, but the one I took was the private IgG antibody offered through the company 'Qured'.
- tim333 6y ago
  Another random datapoint. I had covid according to a PCR test and it was pretty much a non event - slight sore throat only. I think unless you get the full can't breath thing it's very hard to tell.
koheripbal 6y ago
Correct - and it was the same in the US. Strong flu season. ...and tests confirmed that it was the "regular" seasonal flu - not covid-19. People want to believe that covid-19 has already worked its way through the entire community because they want to believe that this is almost over. The data does not support that position.
- lymeeducator 6y ago
  We do not have the data to support or refute the original statement. Mostly because the US has a poor understanding of the uniqueness and context of every person's immune system and how it plays a role in new viruses, reactivating old viruses, depleting nutrition required to successfully fight off multiple strains through the winter season, having multiple pathogens at once and a suppressed immune system, etc. This lack of understanding requires a lot more testing of pathogens, T-cells, mast cells, and signaling (cytokines, etc) from a lot of people. It's usually seen as too costly or invasive. Not that this current pandemic has been costly ;-) In the US Midwest it was very harsh for flu, conjunctivitis, strep, etc. My children both had coughs, fever, ruptured right ear and one had chicken pox style rash (late December). Doctors never tested my son, my daughter tested negative for flu with multi-day symptoms and then positive for flu A (same test) ~10 days later. So there is/was a definite lack of data. Unfortunately, we do not have the samples to go back in time and apply newer tests. Luckily, France had the foresight to preserve some of the samples.
  - amalter 6y ago
    Why not get a serological test? They are being offered inexpensively at least here in NYC by commercial urgent care facilities. I expect the mail-in Labs will get geared up pretty quickly also.
    - lymeeducator 6y ago
      Antibody tests are becoming more available. So that's an option for me and possibly my young children when I can afford to pay for it.

TomMarius 6y ago

Same in CZ, I had the baddest flu in January, I even went to have a covid test now, but I still didn't have it

iso947 6y ago
Antibody year? How accurate are they at an individual level?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Highly depends on the test, some are very susceptible to false positives from other coronaviruses. PCR tests have high false negative rates, but low false positive.
smcl 6y ago
I had a horrific one in January too, the first time I've ever been ill enough to get a neschopenka.

Giorgi 6y ago

Wishful thinking. It was h1n1. If there was also breathing problems reported - then we are talking

dilyevsky 6y ago
+1 this “i had the worst flu” meme needs to die - nobody was stockpiling dead bodies in mobile refrigerators in jan as far as i recall
- thu2111 6y ago
  Your statement isn't logical. Disease spread tends to always show a pretty standard shape. It was that observation (Farr's law) that led to epidemiology being born as a field. It grows, it peaks, it enters immediate decline. Importantly the peak doesn't last long - epidemics don't spend 6 months with a stable number of people getting sick at the peak. Look at graphs of COVID deaths and cases and you'll see the standard pattern. We know now that this virus has left hospitals virtually everywhere without overload, even in places like Sweden. A few other places were hit much harder. But the response in New York (with mobile morgues) wasn't reported anywhere else. It's apparently some kind of invention of New York policymakers during a brief peak rather than a worldwide phenomenon. A virus can be spreading and growing for a long time before it attracts attention. The evidence keeps mounting that the first reports in Wuhan were not in fact the first cases after COVID had mutated or crossed from animals but merely the first where doctors decided to search for a novel virus after coming under pressure and noticing some novel symptoms. What you saw in New York was a mix of: 1. Conditions at the absolute peak of infection, not at the start. 2. Media hype and fake news. For (2) I present https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-fr... as evidence. CNBC spliced video from an ICU in Italy into reports about New York without telling anyone. Outright deliberate deception is also the tip of an iceberg: there's far more selective reporting, exaggerated anecdotes and so on. On April 6th Vox reported the entire USA was running out of sedatives needed for ventilation: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-ventilators-drug-shortage-sedatives-covid-19 https://www.vox.com/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-v... On the same day Gov Cuomo was saying they had enough ventilators with some in reserve. A few days later he was sending them to other parts of the USA. Whatever you think you know about the situation in New York you really only have a tiny fragment of the whole picture (and the same for me and everyone else posting here). Our understand of reality lies shattered in pieces on the floor, smashed by speed, poor quality data, poor use of data, and extremely poor journalism. All we can do is work to piece together a narrative of what really happened by examining all the evidence we can get. Repeated anecdotes from many different people about having had a COVID-like illness before it was being discussed much are interesting for that reason.

ainiriand 6y ago

It might sound absurd, but here in Ireland everyone in the office got a strong cold early February, including me and my wife. Also my mum back in north Spain and my brother in the Canary Islands got sick as well. It is very interesting the fact that I have never seen my brother sick in some 30 years and we talk almost every day.

koheripbal 6y ago
There are still more people with other colds & flus than covid-19. Being sick today, still likely means you have something OTHER than covid-19
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Yep. Even in peak coronona over 90% of tests come back negative for covid-19.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alkonaut 6y ago

I keep hearing this. I also had the worst cold in 10 years easily, this january. My kids were unaffected but me and the wife had 40 deg fevers and muscle pains for days. The whole family took the seasonal flu vaccine (not sure if it was the correct one this year). What seems to indicate that it wasn't Covid was that at the same time as all of us had that monster flu in january, the hospitals weren't filling up with people who couldn't breathe.

gridlockd 6y ago
The hospitals are filling up with cases of viral pneumonia every year, at the beginning there would have been nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a bad flu season.
- notahacker 6y ago
  And by late February and early March when medical professionals were hunting for signs of the novel coronavirus and people were about to start being hospitalised and dying in large numbers, there'd be an enormous amount of hospital inpatients with respiratory symptoms to test. We know this wasn't the case until later...
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    That's a fallacy. At any point in time, there will be patients showing up with viral pneumonia in the hospitals, with some seasonal variance. For there to be a discernible difference here, you need a "critical mass" of cases. How many such cases are necessary depends on the incidence of severe cases vs non-severe cases, but we do not know the amount of non-severe cases, because we did not test everyone. Antibody studies suggest that there are 10x as many cases as reported. If that is true, then there could have been hundreds of thousands of cases that went undetected along with some more severe cases that were labeled as "viral pneumonia". The different rates of infection in different countries may well have more to do with the amount of testing than the actual infection rate.
- jwandborg 6y ago

Tepix 6y ago

Just to provide a counter point: Noone in my family got the flu this winter. I have one friend who got it (and it was bad) but that's the only one i know of.