9 ms·

Here are a couple of anecdotal data points: I was traveling in Japan and Taiwan in October of 2019. I came down with a weird flu-like illness that persisted f

Here are a couple of anecdotal data points: I was traveling in Japan and Taiwan in October of 2019. I came down with a weird flu-like illness that persisted for three or four weeks (much longer than a flu would have normally lasted for me). And it wasn't just that the symptoms persisted. I really felt sick for that long (with fever and sweats). The flu-like thing also came after a week or so of diarrhea. Could have just been GI issues related to traveling but who knows? Ever since it was reported that the pandemic may have begun earlier than had previously been thought, I've been wondering if I didn't in fact get this virus very early on. I also had a colleague with me who was traveling with his wife. His wife was also very sick with some kind of super-flu like thing. She was saying it was basically the worst flu of her life.

codezero 6y ago
Have you had the opportunity/availability to get an antibody test? Everyone I've heard with such an anecdote has received multiple negative antibody tests, anecdata! (Only two people I've known)
- subsubzero 6y ago
  My Brother was in China in November and got pretty sick with back to back to back colds/flu like bugs, I also was very sick for late Nov. - late December, didn't have a fever but had a hard time breathing than normal for a cold/flu, I asked my Doctor and a friend at Stanford and both of them said the antibody tests they have are not accurate. I really want piece of mind if I had covid-19 but am still waiting for a decent antibody test.
  - jupp0r 6y ago
    For your situation, existing antibody tests are fine. They are not accurate enough to do mass testing to find out how prevalent SARS2 is in the population. This is because the base rate in the population is pretty low. If you are reasonably sure that you've had it, a false negative/false positive for you is still pretty unlikely (in the 5% order of magnitude range for lateral flow antibody tests, better for ELISA lab tests).
    - gizmo 6y ago
      A positive test result for antibodies is a strong indicator for having been exposed to covid, but a negative test result doesn't say much because 80% of people exposed to covid don't produce antibodies, even if they get sick and recover. It doesn't matter how good the test is if seropositivity is the exception rather than the rule.
      - lbeltrame 6y ago
        > because 80% of people exposed to covid don't produce antibodies Are there any data available to support this claim? That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive, but it is still a pretty bold statement. The last I read (a Nature Genetics study, if I recall) was that the antibody quantity was lower in milder cases (but with a large inter-person variability).
        gizmo 6y ago
        Yes, I linked to a relevant paper in this thread. (And I think it's what you would expect for a disease that is non-symptomatic for many young/healthy people.) > That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive Not necessarily, because adaptive antibodies produced through previous exposure to coronaviruses can also bind to covid19.
        lbeltrame 6y ago
        At least the abstract says something different: > Nevertheless, rare but recurring RBD-specific antibodies with potent antiviral activity were found in all individuals tested, suggesting that a vaccine designed to elicit such antibodies could be broadly effective. Very low levels, but still produced. (Note that I still have to dig through the paper.)
        gizmo 6y ago
        My understanding is that those RBD-specific antibodies are not necessarily produced as a response to covid19, but I could be mistaken. In addition: > Plasmas collected an average of 39 days after the onset of symptoms had variable half-maximal neutralizing titers ranging from undetectable in 33% to below 1:1000 in 79% Of course this is only a single study and more research is needed, but I notice people draw way too strong conclusions from studies that show low seropositivity prevalence.
  - SllX 6y ago
    I’m waiting on these antibody tests as well. My symptoms weren’t as bad as yours but I too had an illness around that time, and so did a fair number of people around me, I remember joking with my drinking buddy that I probably got whatever it was from her. I’m still mostly convinced that whatever it was, it wasn’t COVID-19, but I can’t ignore the sheer number of stories that I keep hearing from people about a strange illness in that time frame. Some medical professionals who I’ve heard on various podcasts addressed these anecdotes and say it probably wasn’t COVID-19, and let’s be fair, it most likely wasn’t. I would still like a way to prove or disprove it though, and same as you, anyone I’ve talked to about it says the antibody tests just aren’t good enough yet to prove anything conclusively. Even the data we do have available sucks. There’s a bunch of States and counties which still aren’t reporting or aren’t reliably reporting recoveries which is artificially inflating the active case count in the United States.
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    A bunch of people in my office got sick about two weeks after chinese new year returnees returned to the office. A few people got very, very sick, unlike any kind of flu they'd had before and a bunch of the rest got a sort of dry cough. On a whim, I decided to go get the abbott antibody test to see if it was Covid-19, because it sure seemed like it might have been. But no, negative.
- gizmo 6y ago
  Recent finding: 80% of people exposed to covid produced only a minimal amount of antibodies. Our immune system protects against millions of diseases, and we don't require specific antibodies for most of them. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.092619v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.092619v2
  - codezero 6y ago
    Super helpful, thanks, I'll read up some more.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    And yet somehow 57% of citizens of Lombardia have covid19 antibodies.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      Are you sure about this claim? I live there and I didn't hear such region wide figures, only local city data. In Bergamo it's closer to that from early data, but for example in Milano it might be from 4 to 10 (but in this case the sample was blood donors, so skewed towards younger and healthy).
    - bonzini 6y ago
      No, it's only in the province of Bergamo and there is selection bias because people that chose to take the test presumably has symptoms before. As a counter-anecdote, I know two people from a less hit area, both of whom had fever, and none of them had any antibodies (like, the test said 0.0 for both IgM and IgG).
      - scotty79 6y ago
        True. Just Bergamo. Which changes nothing in my argument. But there's a claim that results were from sufficiently large and random sample: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thejakartapost.com/amp/news/2020/06/09/over-half-of-people-tested-in-italys-bergamo-have-covid-19-antibodies.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thejakartapost.com/amp/news... If that's true then my argument still holds. How can 80% not get antibodies if they were detected in 57% of large random sample of some population?
kube-system 6y ago
I have a similar anecdote, but tested negative for nCoV antibodies. I figure my human brain is just prone to availability bias. There were and still are lot of viruses out there, and many share similar symptoms.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  It's also possible the antibody test is inaccurate. TWIV (This Week in Virology) reported a big double-digit false negative rate.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    Sorry, what's TWIV?
    - thanatosmin 6y ago
      https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
    - doubleunplussed 6y ago
      It's This Week in Virology, and a reminder to everyone that acronyms are not as well known as you think they are, please spell them out unless they're very common or have already been defined.
- azinman2 6y ago
  What’s the sensitivity of the test you took?
  - kube-system 6y ago
    100% ...according to the one limited study that it was the subject of.
- JTon 6y ago
  A take it or leave it anecdote for you: I was chatting with an actuary working in life insurance field who is heavily involved in the pandemic industry groups. The actuary told me the antibody test is considered unreliable and has as high as 50% false negative rate.
koheripbal 6y ago
That happened to me in South America in 2009. These individual data points are not meaningful. Maybe it was covid... but it just doesn't tell us anything since there's obviously a reporting bias here.
mfer 6y ago
There are more than one major flu strands in the wild now and depending on which we got first will tell us how we react to the other. Or, so I'm told. Here's a video on the flu from 1918 that killed many. It's a few years old and talks about our responses to virus and how they trace them. It's enlightening.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk In any case, it could have been a bad flu infection. An antibody test would really help. I know several people who had a bad flu that was detected as influenza.
bradly 6y ago
After visiting my brother in Las Vegas the first week of February I came down with a fever, sweats, and extremely bad cough with wheezing in my chest for over a week. I saw a doctor two weeks in and she thought I had bronchitis and prescribed me an inhaler. The Rx failed to treat the cough or wheezing. I emailed the doctor after over a week and she was surprised the medication wasn't working. It ran it's course for about a month exactly. Now I don't actually think I had COVID-19, but the chance is non-zero for sure. I wish it was cheap/easy to get an antibody test in the U.S. so I won't need to worry as much in the small chance I did actually have it.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  It is free and easy (drive thru) in some parts of the US. Check with your local health resources.
  - bradly 6y ago
    Unfortunately the free and easy ones in my county are diagnostic only.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > Unfortunately the free and easy ones in my county are diagnostic only. Exactly, I just got tested for antibodies, and since my insurance has lapsed as my Industry was the worst hit in this pandemic I had to pay out of pocket. It was $99 for the visit, and $50 for the lab results. They said there was a program where the State would pick up the tab but they'd need my credit card on file in case it doesn't get processed etc... I just opted to pay for it instead and keep the State out of this and pay those people who are currently risking their lives working at hospitals and clinics. They were super busy, too. They said it would be a 30 min affair and turned into nearly 2 hours. I'm glad I opted for antibody test and not the swab (I'm no longer showing symptoms) because I can see why Human error is one of the biggest reasons its yielding less than ideal validity.
- adrr 6y ago
  https://patient.labcorp.com/covid-19-antibody-test https://patient.labcorp.com/covid-19-antibody-test It’s $10 with insurance with one caveat that your state may not allow self testing without seeing a doctor.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Many respiratory tract viruses are also gastro intentional track viruses. It makes sense because the thing they’re getting in to is mucous membranes, which the GI is lined with.
Retric 6y ago
There are a lot of illnesses out there. Some of my friends where making regular trips to central China in the late 90’s and described how anyone joining them got horrifically sick at least once. Though regulars tended to have fewer issues. Presumably, they where in contact with a range of local diseases most of which never spread widely enough to become a pandemic. It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population.
- Marsymars 6y ago
  > It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population. I was wondering about this the other day. How can we know if some other zoonotic coronavirus spread to a only single rural household somewhere? Is there any way to estimate this? Is there any literature on the subject?
jondwillis 6y ago
I took a domestic flight on Saturday and have had GI issues starting today. I procured a COVID-19 test kit before I flew just in case, and am thinking of administering it tomorrow or the day after. :\
foobarian 6y ago
I heard a handful of first hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers/friends over last 9 months, but what gets me is that mortality anomalies only started in what, late Feb? That's what I can't square away with the anecdotes.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  How do you know that they weren't attributed to the flu or complications thereof?
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Because when you look at the excess deaths charts [1], there's nothing at all surprising before mid-March. Then from mid-March onwards, deaths (from all causes) go through the roof. So there simply wasn't any death toll before mid-March that suggests at all that the virus could have been spreading much earlier. Likewise, we would have seen the hospitals becoming overwhelmed earlier. Any unchecked spread in the fall or January would have caused those charts to have started spiking much earlier. There's no evidence for earlier community spread, and good evidence against it. You can't have a virus that can spread widely, and only later turn on its lethality. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
- baddox 6y ago
  How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness. I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.
bamboozled 6y ago
Same thing happened to me November 2018. I wonder if it started back then?
herval 6y ago
Were you tested for antibodies? I know at least half a dozen people who have the exact same theory - a couple got tested and it came out negative
galkk 6y ago
I had horrible sickness (was tested for flu, but it wasn't, doctors assumed pneumonia) in end of September, that led to me being part OOO for entire October, after returning from my European vacation. I'm joking to my wife that I'm patient 0 or close: part of the vacation was in Italy (worst hit), then I went to Zurich, then to Seattle (I live close to Kirkland, where first covid cluster started). p.s. No, it wasn't COVID, at least I recently tested and was said that I don't have it. I haven't asked if I have antibodies though.
- Marsymars 6y ago
  In the past five years I've had three multi-week overseas vacations where I've had to take a week or more off sick from work immediately on returning home. Each of those years, that was my only time that year getting sick. I assume travelling just exposes us to more people, more unsanitary situations, and more opportunities to wear down our immune systems.
icedistilled 6y ago
The flu literally kills people. If it doesn't put someone in the ICU or the ground, i'm not sure "super" flu is the appropriate term. What would normal flu that kills people be called then? It's not diminishing someone's experience to simply say the flu. Also, I was sick three separate times in the first three months of the year. Very different symptoms each time. There were nasty colds going around.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  You do realise that the `normal` flu kills people, right?
  - icedistilled 6y ago
    I don't follow. That's literally what I said. >"What would normal flu that kills people be called then?"
    - TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
      I misread your comment
jsf01 6y ago
Have you taken an antibody test? Been sick since you got over that illness in 2019? You could help add a datapoint to this Fall 2019 mystery.

codezero 6y ago

Have you had the opportunity/availability to get an antibody test? Everyone I've heard with such an anecdote has received multiple negative antibody tests, anecdata! (Only two people I've known)

subsubzero 6y ago
My Brother was in China in November and got pretty sick with back to back to back colds/flu like bugs, I also was very sick for late Nov. - late December, didn't have a fever but had a hard time breathing than normal for a cold/flu, I asked my Doctor and a friend at Stanford and both of them said the antibody tests they have are not accurate. I really want piece of mind if I had covid-19 but am still waiting for a decent antibody test.
- jupp0r 6y ago
  For your situation, existing antibody tests are fine. They are not accurate enough to do mass testing to find out how prevalent SARS2 is in the population. This is because the base rate in the population is pretty low. If you are reasonably sure that you've had it, a false negative/false positive for you is still pretty unlikely (in the 5% order of magnitude range for lateral flow antibody tests, better for ELISA lab tests).
  - gizmo 6y ago
    A positive test result for antibodies is a strong indicator for having been exposed to covid, but a negative test result doesn't say much because 80% of people exposed to covid don't produce antibodies, even if they get sick and recover. It doesn't matter how good the test is if seropositivity is the exception rather than the rule.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      > because 80% of people exposed to covid don't produce antibodies Are there any data available to support this claim? That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive, but it is still a pretty bold statement. The last I read (a Nature Genetics study, if I recall) was that the antibody quantity was lower in milder cases (but with a large inter-person variability).
      - gizmo 6y ago
        Yes, I linked to a relevant paper in this thread. (And I think it's what you would expect for a disease that is non-symptomatic for many young/healthy people.) > That would mean that the virus is cleared by the innate immune system and not the adaptive Not necessarily, because adaptive antibodies produced through previous exposure to coronaviruses can also bind to covid19.
        lbeltrame 6y ago
        At least the abstract says something different: > Nevertheless, rare but recurring RBD-specific antibodies with potent antiviral activity were found in all individuals tested, suggesting that a vaccine designed to elicit such antibodies could be broadly effective. Very low levels, but still produced. (Note that I still have to dig through the paper.)
        gizmo 6y ago
        My understanding is that those RBD-specific antibodies are not necessarily produced as a response to covid19, but I could be mistaken. In addition: > Plasmas collected an average of 39 days after the onset of symptoms had variable half-maximal neutralizing titers ranging from undetectable in 33% to below 1:1000 in 79% Of course this is only a single study and more research is needed, but I notice people draw way too strong conclusions from studies that show low seropositivity prevalence.
- SllX 6y ago
  I’m waiting on these antibody tests as well. My symptoms weren’t as bad as yours but I too had an illness around that time, and so did a fair number of people around me, I remember joking with my drinking buddy that I probably got whatever it was from her. I’m still mostly convinced that whatever it was, it wasn’t COVID-19, but I can’t ignore the sheer number of stories that I keep hearing from people about a strange illness in that time frame. Some medical professionals who I’ve heard on various podcasts addressed these anecdotes and say it probably wasn’t COVID-19, and let’s be fair, it most likely wasn’t. I would still like a way to prove or disprove it though, and same as you, anyone I’ve talked to about it says the antibody tests just aren’t good enough yet to prove anything conclusively. Even the data we do have available sucks. There’s a bunch of States and counties which still aren’t reporting or aren’t reliably reporting recoveries which is artificially inflating the active case count in the United States.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  A bunch of people in my office got sick about two weeks after chinese new year returnees returned to the office. A few people got very, very sick, unlike any kind of flu they'd had before and a bunch of the rest got a sort of dry cough. On a whim, I decided to go get the abbott antibody test to see if it was Covid-19, because it sure seemed like it might have been. But no, negative.
gizmo 6y ago
Recent finding: 80% of people exposed to covid produced only a minimal amount of antibodies. Our immune system protects against millions of diseases, and we don't require specific antibodies for most of them. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.092619v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.092619v2
- codezero 6y ago
  Super helpful, thanks, I'll read up some more.
- scotty79 6y ago
  And yet somehow 57% of citizens of Lombardia have covid19 antibodies.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    Are you sure about this claim? I live there and I didn't hear such region wide figures, only local city data. In Bergamo it's closer to that from early data, but for example in Milano it might be from 4 to 10 (but in this case the sample was blood donors, so skewed towards younger and healthy).
  - bonzini 6y ago
    No, it's only in the province of Bergamo and there is selection bias because people that chose to take the test presumably has symptoms before. As a counter-anecdote, I know two people from a less hit area, both of whom had fever, and none of them had any antibodies (like, the test said 0.0 for both IgM and IgG).
    - scotty79 6y ago
      True. Just Bergamo. Which changes nothing in my argument. But there's a claim that results were from sufficiently large and random sample: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thejakartapost.com/amp/news/2020/06/09/over-half-of-people-tested-in-italys-bergamo-have-covid-19-antibodies.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thejakartapost.com/amp/news... If that's true then my argument still holds. How can 80% not get antibodies if they were detected in 57% of large random sample of some population?

kube-system 6y ago

I have a similar anecdote, but tested negative for nCoV antibodies. I figure my human brain is just prone to availability bias. There were and still are lot of viruses out there, and many share similar symptoms.

koheripbal 6y ago
It's also possible the antibody test is inaccurate. TWIV (This Week in Virology) reported a big double-digit false negative rate.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  Sorry, what's TWIV?
  - thanatosmin 6y ago
    https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
  - doubleunplussed 6y ago
    It's This Week in Virology, and a reminder to everyone that acronyms are not as well known as you think they are, please spell them out unless they're very common or have already been defined.
azinman2 6y ago
What’s the sensitivity of the test you took?
- kube-system 6y ago
  100% ...according to the one limited study that it was the subject of.
JTon 6y ago
A take it or leave it anecdote for you: I was chatting with an actuary working in life insurance field who is heavily involved in the pandemic industry groups. The actuary told me the antibody test is considered unreliable and has as high as 50% false negative rate.

koheripbal 6y ago

That happened to me in South America in 2009. These individual data points are not meaningful. Maybe it was covid... but it just doesn't tell us anything since there's obviously a reporting bias here.

mfer 6y ago

There are more than one major flu strands in the wild now and depending on which we got first will tell us how we react to the other. Or, so I'm told. Here's a video on the flu from 1918 that killed many. It's a few years old and talks about our responses to virus and how they trace them. It's enlightening.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk In any case, it could have been a bad flu infection. An antibody test would really help. I know several people who had a bad flu that was detected as influenza.

bradly 6y ago

After visiting my brother in Las Vegas the first week of February I came down with a fever, sweats, and extremely bad cough with wheezing in my chest for over a week. I saw a doctor two weeks in and she thought I had bronchitis and prescribed me an inhaler. The Rx failed to treat the cough or wheezing. I emailed the doctor after over a week and she was surprised the medication wasn't working. It ran it's course for about a month exactly. Now I don't actually think I had COVID-19, but the chance is non-zero for sure. I wish it was cheap/easy to get an antibody test in the U.S. so I won't need to worry as much in the small chance I did actually have it.

bonestamp2 6y ago
It is free and easy (drive thru) in some parts of the US. Check with your local health resources.
- bradly 6y ago
  Unfortunately the free and easy ones in my county are diagnostic only.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Unfortunately the free and easy ones in my county are diagnostic only. Exactly, I just got tested for antibodies, and since my insurance has lapsed as my Industry was the worst hit in this pandemic I had to pay out of pocket. It was $99 for the visit, and $50 for the lab results. They said there was a program where the State would pick up the tab but they'd need my credit card on file in case it doesn't get processed etc... I just opted to pay for it instead and keep the State out of this and pay those people who are currently risking their lives working at hospitals and clinics. They were super busy, too. They said it would be a 30 min affair and turned into nearly 2 hours. I'm glad I opted for antibody test and not the swab (I'm no longer showing symptoms) because I can see why Human error is one of the biggest reasons its yielding less than ideal validity.
adrr 6y ago
https://patient.labcorp.com/covid-19-antibody-test https://patient.labcorp.com/covid-19-antibody-test It’s $10 with insurance with one caveat that your state may not allow self testing without seeing a doctor.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

Many respiratory tract viruses are also gastro intentional track viruses. It makes sense because the thing they’re getting in to is mucous membranes, which the GI is lined with.

Retric 6y ago

There are a lot of illnesses out there. Some of my friends where making regular trips to central China in the late 90’s and described how anyone joining them got horrifically sick at least once. Though regulars tended to have fewer issues. Presumably, they where in contact with a range of local diseases most of which never spread widely enough to become a pandemic. It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population.

Marsymars 6y ago
> It’s surprisingly difficult to track the this stuff in part because many diseases make the jump but then simply die out without gaining a major foothold in the human population. I was wondering about this the other day. How can we know if some other zoonotic coronavirus spread to a only single rural household somewhere? Is there any way to estimate this? Is there any literature on the subject?

jondwillis 6y ago

I took a domestic flight on Saturday and have had GI issues starting today. I procured a COVID-19 test kit before I flew just in case, and am thinking of administering it tomorrow or the day after. :\

foobarian 6y ago

I heard a handful of first hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers/friends over last 9 months, but what gets me is that mortality anomalies only started in what, late Feb? That's what I can't square away with the anecdotes.

pfundstein 6y ago
How do you know that they weren't attributed to the flu or complications thereof?
- SamBam 6y ago
  Because when you look at the excess deaths charts [1], there's nothing at all surprising before mid-March. Then from mid-March onwards, deaths (from all causes) go through the roof. So there simply wasn't any death toll before mid-March that suggests at all that the virus could have been spreading much earlier. Likewise, we would have seen the hospitals becoming overwhelmed earlier. Any unchecked spread in the fall or January would have caused those charts to have started spiking much earlier. There's no evidence for earlier community spread, and good evidence against it. You can't have a virus that can spread widely, and only later turn on its lethality. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronaviru...
baddox 6y ago
How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness. I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.

bamboozled 6y ago

Same thing happened to me November 2018. I wonder if it started back then?

herval 6y ago

Were you tested for antibodies? I know at least half a dozen people who have the exact same theory - a couple got tested and it came out negative

galkk 6y ago

I had horrible sickness (was tested for flu, but it wasn't, doctors assumed pneumonia) in end of September, that led to me being part OOO for entire October, after returning from my European vacation. I'm joking to my wife that I'm patient 0 or close: part of the vacation was in Italy (worst hit), then I went to Zurich, then to Seattle (I live close to Kirkland, where first covid cluster started). p.s. No, it wasn't COVID, at least I recently tested and was said that I don't have it. I haven't asked if I have antibodies though.

Marsymars 6y ago
In the past five years I've had three multi-week overseas vacations where I've had to take a week or more off sick from work immediately on returning home. Each of those years, that was my only time that year getting sick. I assume travelling just exposes us to more people, more unsanitary situations, and more opportunities to wear down our immune systems.

icedistilled 6y ago

The flu literally kills people. If it doesn't put someone in the ICU or the ground, i'm not sure "super" flu is the appropriate term. What would normal flu that kills people be called then? It's not diminishing someone's experience to simply say the flu. Also, I was sick three separate times in the first three months of the year. Very different symptoms each time. There were nasty colds going around.

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
You do realise that the `normal` flu kills people, right?
- icedistilled 6y ago
  I don't follow. That's literally what I said. >"What would normal flu that kills people be called then?"
  - TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
    I misread your comment

jsf01 6y ago

Have you taken an antibody test? Been sick since you got over that illness in 2019? You could help add a datapoint to this Fall 2019 mystery.