15 ms·

NIH study offers new evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 infections in U.S.

170 points by infodocket 5y ago

aphextron 5y ago
I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu. What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.
    - happytoexplain 5y ago
      Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID. As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.
      - rsynnott 5y ago
        I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu. I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard. I am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the timing was definitely odd.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > But the timing was definitely odd. A nasty cold or flu hitting in the middle of cold and flu season isn’t that odd, as timing goes. Sure, in 2020 it’s a coincidence that naturally raises the “was it COVID?” question, but not really odd timing if it wasn’t.
    - mattlondon 5y ago
      Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had covid in the past few months prior. Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.
      - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
        > seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now. I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had not had Covid. The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).
      - qqqwerty 5y ago
        In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have caught covid. And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was definitely something that was going around at that time.
- toast0 5y ago
  My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms point more towards whooping cough. Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.
- stadium 5y ago
  Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very ill as well. I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with each case. All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death bed.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.
- e40 5y ago
  Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break. Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect that pretty much nails it as covid for me.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    First time I’ve seen i18n used like this in the wild.
    - e40 5y ago
      We're among friends here, so I didn't even give it a 2nd thought... :)
- NoOneNew 5y ago
  Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion, which I normally should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like, crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later. No one else around me caught it.
- eynsham 5y ago
  Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections in the US before they were first detected; they don’t suggest that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is plausible, ‘almost impossible’ looks to me like it’s rather understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of Covid.
- stordoff 5y ago
  I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough, full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19, particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases. I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the first illness was something else.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I had something similar in 2017
- docderanged 5y ago
  yo aphex want to talk like a man or do i have to give out the information about you and how you have child porn on your computer? i dont want to get you fired and go to your house man jsut hit me up in my temp email eponuts2022@gmail.com or im goign to have to let your boss know and show him all the screen shots
- docderanged 5y ago
  what is your adress in north carolina i want to see you face to face since your bitch ass wont let me know whats up over the internet, fuck you alex , im watchign you man you should go to jail alex
deadite 5y ago
April last year, when this whole thing hit, we had people under throwaway accounts including myself speaking about this on HN, and as expected we hit a roadblock because anecdotes aren't data and whatever, so we were downvoted, called conspiracy theorists and other nonsense. There's ultimately nothing for any of us to gain in lying that we've been asked, by our doctors, going back to October of 2019, whether or not we've been to Wuhan (asked specifically and point blank). There's a lot more that we know than we are willing to share because HN just isn't a good platform for this sort of discussion anymore. It's too politicized and too many bruised, sensitive egos that can't handle contrary thinking. So for the rest of you, you'll have to get used to constantly having to shift and re-evaluate what you think you "know" and how you feel about a certain thing today, and the kind of statements and comments you've made in the past based on events that you think did or did not happen (because you've been told, and you believe what you're being told by the big media) when, in fact, it may turn out that the "truth" was factually incorrect or hidden from you to begin with. Take it however you may, just please don't shoot the messenger.
- nenaan 5y ago
  Nytimes had articles on it in late dec 2019, and january 2020. April 2020 is months past my states emergency orders.
  - deadite 5y ago
    I agree. But people seemed to not be able to entertain the thought that doctors were aware something was happening back in October. In their minds, I think, if the big media did not have an article on it, then it doesn't exist. This is a grievous state of affairs for discussions, because it means NYT and others are effectively the Ministry of Truth for HN.
    - elorant 5y ago
      Dude, it's one thing sharing your experience, and a whole different to assume that doctors knew and are hiding something. Just because there were scattered cases here and there doesn't mean that the medical community could correlate them all and understand what they were dealing with.
dyingkneepad 5y ago
In early December 2019 my son in the US West got something that perfectly matches covid: looked like a cold, it got bad and then he got better, then two days later is got much worse. So we took him to the hospital and they concluded he had pneumonia, and also that it was not the flu. We treated the pneumonia and he got better and we all moved forward. My other son and wife also got milder cases, while I was mostly fine (but not 100%). There's no way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly was not the Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid symptoms. We'll never know, unless somehow they find the stuff collected by the hospital and analyze it again.
- bluetwo 5y ago
  You can get antibody tests now to find out.
  - negativegate 5y ago
    If you've also been vaccinated is it possible to distinguish that? Edit: I suppose in this case they could test prior samples, but if you don't have any, you're out of luck?
    - numpad0 5y ago
      I wonder if it’s theoretically possible to construct a historical timeline of immunity development for an individual by taking multiple tests, sounds like a proper forensics work than something to do just out of curiosity.
    - mattzito 5y ago
      I know this! It depends on the antibody test - if you can get a test for the nucleocapsid antibodies, that will determine whether you had the disease or not. People who are vaccinated will test positive for the spike protein, but will not test positive for the nucleocapsid antibodies, at least with the vaccines currently available (I believe there are vaccines in development that target both proteins, but not yet available). Some antibody tests target spike or nucleocapsid, some target both, so you need to check which tests they are using and verify what it tests against (or ask your doctor to order a specific test that checks for the nucleocapsid antibodies). I learned this when I was part of a vaccine study and was curious to know whether I had gotten the vaccine or the placebo, and was able to use a spike antibody test to confirm that I was in the vaccine group.
throwaway4good 5y ago
So what do you see if you examine blood samples further back than January 2020?
- aranazo 5y ago
  They found covid-19 Antibodies in Italian blood samples from September 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ PCR tests on Spanish sewer water found positive samples even earlier in 2019. I think the earliest so far French case was in early December 2019. I hope lots more studies are proceeding.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    That aspect gets largely ignored in any discussion regarding Covids origin. Impossible to follow those really early cases up, tracing the infection lines I guess.
throwaway4good 5y ago
I think it is fairly obvious that this virus could have circulated considerably earlier than the first confirmed cases in Wuhan mid November 2020, given its nature of asymptomic spread and form of disease which easily could be mistaken for something else. The work with blood sample analysis should be done all over the planet and its range should be broadened to samples earlier than January 2020.
- floxy 5y ago
  >given its nature of asymptomatic spread Does anyone have a pointer to the latest information on asymptomatic spread? This is the latest thing I've found, and it doesn't seem to think asymptomatic spreading is likely. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    Agreed. This is the big study, a city wide screening in Wuhan found not a single documented case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w And beyond that this is a meta-analysis of 54 studies showing near 0 presymptomatic/asymptomatic rate: https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researchers-find-no-asymptomatic-spread/ https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researche...
- mmmrtl 5y ago
  You can estimate the date of the outbreak's origin with phylodynamics, using the diversity of circulating SARS-CoV-2 and its mutation rate to estimate the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) as 27.11.2019 [CI 07.11.2019 - 11.12.2019]. "Considerably earlier" doesn't fit the evidence https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiological-analysis-of-128-genomes/423 https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiologi...
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    It could have been spreading somewhere else, undetected or mistaken for something else.
williesleg 5y ago
Fake news from the fakers.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
The crucial bit of information is omitted - were these cases locally acquired or were they imported? Did the NIH follow up on that?
mattzito 5y ago
Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february, early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait. We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative. So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the people involved took a rational/science minded approach and bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for others. >So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Holy hell this. I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like a bad flu." I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind. Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would teach them.
grawprog 5y ago
I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was hard to clear the congestion. It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time. It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again. We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.
- cmbuck 5y ago
  Have any of you get tested for antibodies?
  - grawprog 5y ago
    I never did, i don't think any of us did. One of us ended up in close proximity however to someone who'd tested positive for covid, just prior to getting the results of their tests. This person did not get sick. That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing should be made of it unless that person were to ever be tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still can't draw any conclusions from it. Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020, just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not because I thought I already had it, but mostly because there's no point in worrying about something I can't change. If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened. I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having been following the rules fairly stringently would unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where I could be exposed for no real reason.
- rhino369 5y ago
feral 5y ago
So many people, even here, read the article and are like "I knew I had covid that December, I had the weirdest cold". But actually this should make you suspicious of such anecdotes. There's just much too many of them for them all to be covid. So they really count as evidence that people just get weird colds and flus. And hence that the weird cold you had in November 2019 was just a weird non-covid cold.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations? When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.
  - el_benhameen 5y ago
    While I agree with the general point you and the op are making, I don’t think your specific assertion is correct. Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion; some people infect large numbers of other people, but most infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the people with these anecdotes didn’t infect anyone they know of is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I do think you’re correct that they didn’t have it).
  - manwe150 5y ago
    I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might provide antibodies for some. We’ve seen that happen multiple times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin stories.
    - myfavoritedog 5y ago
felipellrocha 5y ago
My mother-in-law got a weird cold at around October where she lost her sense of smell for a few days.
- passivate 5y ago
  So did my brother in Jan 2021. Turns out it was sinus related :)
myfavoritedog 5y ago
I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted. The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often. I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had something that "surely might have been COVID".
- wolverine876 5y ago
  I have a weird itch on my a-- right now. It is the next pandemic.
- giarc 5y ago
  I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc). The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost every other resp virus has disappeared.
- guilhas 5y ago
  Last November/December was for me the strangest flu season ever, coughing and sneezing for abnormally long period, my coworkers and mother also. And after, in January, I got a really strange what looked like herpes in the face. Followed by finger infection which I had never had, which could mean my immune system was abnormally weak So that's that
  - asdff 5y ago
    Thats another variable here. People get older and are more weak over time. Diseases hit you worse in your 30s than in your 20s. Health conditions also tend to crop up after a certain age, like heart conditions that you might blame on a vaccine instead of just you getting older and being predisposed to this condition.
reureu 5y ago
If you're reading this article and live in the US, you should really consider enrolling in the All of Us research study: https://www.joinallofus.org https://www.joinallofus.org It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many many others :)
dcolkitt 5y ago
I think this is a good argument for the government to start a program to do an ongoing “serological census”. On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If there’s ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of, this would give us the data before we’re even aware of its existence.
- shalmanese 5y ago
  That feels like a wonderfully efficient way to generate a continuously fertile crop of new conspiracy theories.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Here's a simple one: do we really trust a government agency (or hell, anyone really) to collect intimate and identifiable data about our bodies all while preserving anonymity and securing the data from nation state attackers? Do we trust nameless data scientists to run SQL queries over us that aren't intended to determine which ones of us will be smarter, stronger, more violent, etc? Do we trust politicians that have not yet been elected to office to use this data for benevolent purposes like our current politicians would (if we trust our current politicians)? Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester inside of concerned populations and spread to non-controversial parts of the government such as the post office and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a good chunk of Jews.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I'm surprised they don't already do that?
  - giarc 5y ago
    The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low. Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the population every month to catch a rare event like that.
throwawaysea 5y ago
There are thousands of travelers flying from China to the US every single day. It seems obvious that the earliest infections would be sooner than January 2020. I remain unsurprised by these new findings, because past conversations around this topic would always be shut down or dismissed, leading to no serious, balanced conversation. Common sense and reasonable speculation were met with vitriol and people tried to claim a moral high road of "trusting the science". Just like with the lab leak theory not actually being "debunked", this too is further evidence of how echo chambers, politics, and groupthink have corrupted discourse.
- mumubro 5y ago
  totally agree, it's funny seeing the idea that covid spread much earlier, which is completely reasonable, being dismissed.
at_a_remove 5y ago
I wish I had it on hand, but I have seen it more than once, including not long after it came out: in October 2019, one of the 4chan folks, one of the lab geeks, posted that they had seen a fairly unusual virus come trucking through in the SARS family. I saw the screenshot posted again around December. I would not be even a little shocked if it were kicking around in early 2019, or even before. Just think of how HIV was skulking about, smoldering, before really catching on the tinder.
- gpcr1949 5y ago
  here's the archived 4chan post [0]. The op is sort of ridiculous and not relevant, but the poster with id pUlkHE7L post some PCR stuff which is very strange to post at that date (21 october 2019 if the timestamps are correct). However, SARS-CoV-2 is 30kb not 35kb. [0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/ https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/
  - mumubro 5y ago
    Not a big difference between 30kb and 35kb if running gel.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    That's the one! Yeah, the timestamps are right, that's when I remember seeing it. Thank you for finding it.
inglor_cz 5y ago
I, too, had a very bad cold in December 2019 and January 2020. With a lot of exhausting dry cough and no unusual bacteria cultivated from samples. Five weeks of utter misery. But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe back then must have been something else.
99_00 5y ago
The real timeline is most certainly earlier than the official one. https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649 https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649
- WiSaGaN 5y ago
  It was already reported in Chinese national TV on Dec 31, 2019 there was pneumonia with unclear reason: http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?id=Artisg2QlHWoHQixNnJMlIHb191231 http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?i...
splithalf 5y ago
I thought I had covid before news of covid even came out. Was googling “novel pneumonia type illnesses” and reading about sequelae. I had had close contact with wuhan travelers in late dec. 2020. Mostly fatigue and headache for a week, then the lung issues started and lasted a month or more. A few weeks later the first couple of California cases from China presented at a local er. Few cared at that point as the politics were inverted early on due to the travel ban, and also the super bowl and impeachment vying for the public’s attention.
throwaway4good 5y ago
From the linked article: "Of the 24,079 study participants with blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi." So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or had the virus at that point. That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been spreading for a while.)
- curiousllama 5y ago
  > Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) That assumption is, uhm, doing a lot of work there
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Yeah, this is selecting for people participating in a medical study, it is far from a random sampling. Lots of very rural America would be ruled out, even if the study participants weren't all from traditional big cities. People that are less mobile also wouldn't participate, etc. Lots of people who wouldn't contract COVID early would also not be likely to participate in this kind of trial. Plus the positives in this case weren't all in January, they spread into March (by which point in time finding positives becomes much more likely). And that's aside from the difficulties with antibody testing and cross-reactivity -- although this study looks a lot better than the previous one.
- infamouscow 5y ago
  > Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) I can't think of anything more anti-science than dismissing data.
  - abfan1127 5y ago
    how is he dismissing data? questionable data should be treated as such... why would a linear extrapolation be a good fit here?
kderbyma 5y ago
why is all this 'new information' the same information that was around last year?....like it's all about a year old.....I was reading articles about this last year in June...
sct202 5y ago
The PDF is at https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab519/6294073 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... : Some details of the positive test collection dates by state: *Illinois Jan 7, Jan 20, Jan 22, Feb 21, Feb 24 *Massachusetts Jan 8 *Wisconsin Feb 3 *Pennsylvania Feb 15 *Mississippi Mar 6 5 were Black, 2 were Latino/Hispanic, 2 were White Page 20 shows that there was a lot of unbalance for the states with samples. Texas for example only had 84 samples processed, but Illinois had 2,426.
- teknopaul 5y ago
  re:Black, Latino/Hispanic, White. Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. I had to ask if I was Hispanic. I speak Spanish, live in Spain but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. N. B. there is no reason for them to even ask if you are or are not. And no, I could not chose to be Hispanic: its a term assigned to you. Some Spanish nationals are Hispanic some are not. Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. It does not matter where you were born or the colour of your skin. Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for "lying" on the visa form. That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    Are you sure? Are the standards for who qualifies according to the law documented somewhere? I always thought that you’re legally able to self-identify however you deem accurate on those government forms in the U.S?
  - Wohlf 5y ago
    Latino/Hispanic is not considered a race by the US government, it's an ethnic group. Latino covers all people of Latin descent including native Spaniards and Portuguese.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. No, its not. Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnic category independent of race. And it doesn’t mean “speaking Spanish”, it means: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” [0] > but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. Told by whom? Obviously this is deeply false. It also contradicts your later claim that: > Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. So, I'm not clear what your story is, is it that it is just an "official racist" code for "Mexican" or is it …something else? > Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for “lying” on the visa form. Neither the immigrant nor non-immigrant visa application form asks for ethnicity in general or Hispanic origin in particular. [1][2] [0] See, e.g., the Census page on it, even though the policy is government-wide where race/ethnic data is collected, under OMB directive: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/about.html https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/abo... [1] nonimmigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-Example_11012019.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-... [2] immigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.p...
donewithcoding 5y ago
My wife works in healthcare and caught some random respiratory illness in December 2019 that lingered on for 3 weeks. Her o2 levels the entire time was hanging around 94-96% so eventually we went to see her PCP. He found "adventitious" sounds in her lungs via stethoscope and prescribed her some steroids. It had an immediate effect and I thank god everyday she was diagnosed and treated before MSM made covid the black plague.
jupp0r 5y ago
The title should really be: as expected, no evidence of Coronavirus infections earlier than original Wuhan outbreak found in the US. With the amount of passenger flights leaving Wuhan daily, it's completely expected to see rapid spread in December, given the current theory of a November initial outbreak.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
In California we have lifted mask, and distancing requirements; in most situations. In all honesty, I didn't mind wearing a mask, and distancing. For one, I didn't have a cold, or flu, this winter. More importantly, and I'm probally in the minority; I have Never liked people I don't know getting to close to me be at DMV, Doctor's office, or the supermarket. Tipsy at the bar is another story. I was hoping social distancing would stick around after the panademic. I guess I'm a bit anti-social? I've noticed the vocal proponents of distancing, and mask wearing, are people whom salary depends on crowds, or packing people into small spaces. I watching Bill Maher right now. He was a big proponent of being safe. Now---he's on the opposite side. Why--he makes part of his living by crowding people into stadiums for his chuckle fest? Even before the pandemic, I always wondered why doctors were perfectly fine with having a waiting room with sick patients, all breathing the same air.
throwaway-7878 5y ago
For context, I don’t usually get sick, and if I do, I rarely if ever get seriously sick. I’ve been seriously sick a handful of times in my life and have definitely had the flu before. Nov. 13th, 2019, I started to come down with a pretty bad cold and left work early. My commute is along a popular train route from downtown to airport (lots of contact points during rush hour). My kids were also not feeling well and we went into the doctors that afternoon. The reaction was typical, “you’ve caught a virus, probably the flu.” At this point my wife was fine. For the next 5 days my fever started to increase and I was knocked out incapacitated. It was the worst that I had ever felt. I can safely say that you can eat jumbo freezies with a fever and won’t experience brain freeze. On Monday the 18th, I went back to the doctor and he listened to my chest and heard the distinctive crackling of pneumonia. He sent me for a chest x-ray and it came back positive. Immediately I was put on antibiotics. Note that I never felt in distress breathing. A few days later it wasn’t getting better, and I went back to the doctors. They increased my dose and also prescribed me a “superbug inhibitor”. I was out of commission for another week before I started to work from home and feeling better. Doctors told me I had bacterial pneumonia. No one did any real tests, nasal swabs, or blood. On Nov. 24th my wife came down with a terrible cold as we had plans to take our family to a theme park. This turned into a stressful trip because she came down sick mid-trip and needed Tylenol frequently. The kids at this point had not shown any real symptoms. Only mild symptoms that came and went. On November 30th, I went to the hospital to get checked out because I was scheduled to travel to re:Invent on Dec. 1st. The pneumonia was still present and they couldn’t tell if it were getting smaller or not (no baseline). They did take my blood though, although no one commented on it. Effectively the doctors told me I was good to travel. Doctors had conflicting opinions on whether I was contagious, or even whether I had a virus or bacterial infection. The double regime of antibiotics and “super bug inhibitor” seemed to do the trick for me. With that in hand I made the decision to travel to Las Vegas. Note that at this point I no idea about Covid-19 but over the next few weeks the reports started to come in, but I still didn’t think about myself being sick. At re:Invent, if you were there, I was the guy with the dry persistent cough which my doctor eventually labeled the “100-day cough” (no kidding). The trouble began almost immediately once I returned from the trip. People I had socialized with were telling me that I made them sick. That felt terrible, and I had been at work at this time and still coughing. Out of respect for folks I decided to work from home for the next couple of weeks. The team I had sat near, then reported all coming down with a terrible cold that weekend. This is all anecdotal of course and no one else I knew came down with pneumonia. Around mid-December I took time off until the new year and effectively sequestered with my family. The only time I felt the pneumonia was when I exerted myself physically. It felt like pressure on my chest. It was still visible on a CT scan in March 2020 when I was admitted to hospital over a potential concern of Covid due to travel (paranoia). I tested negative for Covid via a nasal swab. Work Travel Timeline: - In early November to Minnesota - In December to Las Vegas - In January to London - In late Feb / early March to NYC I came home from NYC just as reports were surfacing of a man getting sick near Times Square, where I had been located. All the while the Covid reporting / story was unfolding. The “joke” was that I was probably patient zero. This is not a funny joke. There is some trust that our medical doctors will do the right thing and we have sentinel programs in place. What struck me about the Covid reporting was how it was presented in the Lancet and immediately became political. Doctors are reporting cases of “pneumonia with unknown origin.” This got me thinking, none of the doctors that investigated me collected blood or nasal swabs. It was all shrugged off as being “flu” or “bacterial pneumonia” a result of “flu.” IIRC there were reports of 2019/2020 being a bad flu season. My thanks go out to the brave Chinese doctors that first identified the gene sequence and shared the data in an effort to prevent pandemic. You are heroes, even if our governments dropped the ball and we’re incapable of making tough decisions based on a lack of early and lagging data in some cases, or because they didn’t share enough data. When we started to hear about antibody tests, and sewage testing being able to show community spread I was certain we would detect Covid in Nov/Dec in NA by looking back. I’m not convinced this testing ever really happened only because I “really expect we would find traces.” At this point we had just entered lockdown (March 2020) and I still haven’t gotten my hair cut. We still don’t know the origins of Covid but we are all told that it started in Wuhan. The first cases were all people who had travelled to or come into contact with people from Wuhan. The serious cases were all mostly associated with elder case homes. Was it a lab accident, or a cave, or an animal that mated with a bat from a cave? Then there is all of us who have this collective experience of thinking we had Covid back in late 2019 / early 2020. Probably not?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
voidfunc 5y ago
Everything unfolded so quickly last year… late Feb I went through SeaTac twice for work travel. By St. Patricks day my state was in full lockdown and there were TP and sanitizer shortages. I think a week later my company shutdown its HQ campus and specifically one of the buildings I had been a month earlier was a super-spreader site. Everything seemed so normal in Jan/Early Feb 2020…

170 points by infodocket 5y ago

I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.

happytoexplain 5y ago
I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu. What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID. As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu. I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.
qqqwerty 5y ago
Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard. I am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the timing was definitely odd.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > But the timing was definitely odd. A nasty cold or flu hitting in the middle of cold and flu season isn’t that odd, as timing goes. Sure, in 2020 it’s a coincidence that naturally raises the “was it COVID?” question, but not really odd timing if it wasn’t.
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had covid in the past few months prior. Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
      > seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now. I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had not had Covid. The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).
    - qqqwerty 5y ago
      In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have caught covid. And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was definitely something that was going around at that time.
toast0 5y ago
My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms point more towards whooping cough. Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.
stadium 5y ago
Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very ill as well. I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with each case. All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death bed.
comeonseriously 5y ago
We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.
e40 5y ago
Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break. Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect that pretty much nails it as covid for me.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  First time I’ve seen i18n used like this in the wild.
  - e40 5y ago
    We're among friends here, so I didn't even give it a 2nd thought... :)
NoOneNew 5y ago
Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion, which I normally should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like, crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later. No one else around me caught it.
eynsham 5y ago
Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections in the US before they were first detected; they don’t suggest that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is plausible, ‘almost impossible’ looks to me like it’s rather understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of Covid.
stordoff 5y ago
I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough, full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19, particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases. I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the first illness was something else.
newsbinator 5y ago
I had something similar in 2017
docderanged 5y ago
yo aphex want to talk like a man or do i have to give out the information about you and how you have child porn on your computer? i dont want to get you fired and go to your house man jsut hit me up in my temp email eponuts2022@gmail.com or im goign to have to let your boss know and show him all the screen shots
docderanged 5y ago
what is your adress in north carolina i want to see you face to face since your bitch ass wont let me know whats up over the internet, fuck you alex , im watchign you man you should go to jail alex

deadite 5y ago

April last year, when this whole thing hit, we had people under throwaway accounts including myself speaking about this on HN, and as expected we hit a roadblock because anecdotes aren't data and whatever, so we were downvoted, called conspiracy theorists and other nonsense. There's ultimately nothing for any of us to gain in lying that we've been asked, by our doctors, going back to October of 2019, whether or not we've been to Wuhan (asked specifically and point blank). There's a lot more that we know than we are willing to share because HN just isn't a good platform for this sort of discussion anymore. It's too politicized and too many bruised, sensitive egos that can't handle contrary thinking. So for the rest of you, you'll have to get used to constantly having to shift and re-evaluate what you think you "know" and how you feel about a certain thing today, and the kind of statements and comments you've made in the past based on events that you think did or did not happen (because you've been told, and you believe what you're being told by the big media) when, in fact, it may turn out that the "truth" was factually incorrect or hidden from you to begin with. Take it however you may, just please don't shoot the messenger.

nenaan 5y ago
Nytimes had articles on it in late dec 2019, and january 2020. April 2020 is months past my states emergency orders.
- deadite 5y ago
  I agree. But people seemed to not be able to entertain the thought that doctors were aware something was happening back in October. In their minds, I think, if the big media did not have an article on it, then it doesn't exist. This is a grievous state of affairs for discussions, because it means NYT and others are effectively the Ministry of Truth for HN.
  - elorant 5y ago
    Dude, it's one thing sharing your experience, and a whole different to assume that doctors knew and are hiding something. Just because there were scattered cases here and there doesn't mean that the medical community could correlate them all and understand what they were dealing with.

dyingkneepad 5y ago

In early December 2019 my son in the US West got something that perfectly matches covid: looked like a cold, it got bad and then he got better, then two days later is got much worse. So we took him to the hospital and they concluded he had pneumonia, and also that it was not the flu. We treated the pneumonia and he got better and we all moved forward. My other son and wife also got milder cases, while I was mostly fine (but not 100%). There's no way to say it was actually covid, but it certainly was not the Flu due to the exam, and it matches all the covid symptoms. We'll never know, unless somehow they find the stuff collected by the hospital and analyze it again.

bluetwo 5y ago
You can get antibody tests now to find out.
- negativegate 5y ago
  If you've also been vaccinated is it possible to distinguish that? Edit: I suppose in this case they could test prior samples, but if you don't have any, you're out of luck?
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I wonder if it’s theoretically possible to construct a historical timeline of immunity development for an individual by taking multiple tests, sounds like a proper forensics work than something to do just out of curiosity.
  - mattzito 5y ago
    I know this! It depends on the antibody test - if you can get a test for the nucleocapsid antibodies, that will determine whether you had the disease or not. People who are vaccinated will test positive for the spike protein, but will not test positive for the nucleocapsid antibodies, at least with the vaccines currently available (I believe there are vaccines in development that target both proteins, but not yet available). Some antibody tests target spike or nucleocapsid, some target both, so you need to check which tests they are using and verify what it tests against (or ask your doctor to order a specific test that checks for the nucleocapsid antibodies). I learned this when I was part of a vaccine study and was curious to know whether I had gotten the vaccine or the placebo, and was able to use a spike antibody test to confirm that I was in the vaccine group.

throwaway4good 5y ago

So what do you see if you examine blood samples further back than January 2020?

aranazo 5y ago
They found covid-19 Antibodies in Italian blood samples from September 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/ PCR tests on Spanish sewer water found positive samples even earlier in 2019. I think the earliest so far French case was in early December 2019. I hope lots more studies are proceeding.
- hef19898 5y ago
  That aspect gets largely ignored in any discussion regarding Covids origin. Impossible to follow those really early cases up, tracing the infection lines I guess.

throwaway4good 5y ago

I think it is fairly obvious that this virus could have circulated considerably earlier than the first confirmed cases in Wuhan mid November 2020, given its nature of asymptomic spread and form of disease which easily could be mistaken for something else. The work with blood sample analysis should be done all over the planet and its range should be broadened to samples earlier than January 2020.

floxy 5y ago
>given its nature of asymptomatic spread Does anyone have a pointer to the latest information on asymptomatic spread? This is the latest thing I've found, and it doesn't seem to think asymptomatic spreading is likely. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Agreed. This is the big study, a city wide screening in Wuhan found not a single documented case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w And beyond that this is a meta-analysis of 54 studies showing near 0 presymptomatic/asymptomatic rate: https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researchers-find-no-asymptomatic-spread/ https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researche...
mmmrtl 5y ago
You can estimate the date of the outbreak's origin with phylodynamics, using the diversity of circulating SARS-CoV-2 and its mutation rate to estimate the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) as 27.11.2019 [CI 07.11.2019 - 11.12.2019]. "Considerably earlier" doesn't fit the evidence https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiological-analysis-of-128-genomes/423 https://virological.org/t/update-2-evolutionary-epidemiologi...
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  It could have been spreading somewhere else, undetected or mistaken for something else.

williesleg 5y ago

Fake news from the fakers.

HarryHirsch 5y ago

The crucial bit of information is omitted - were these cases locally acquired or were they imported? Did the NIH follow up on that?

mattzito 5y ago

Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february, early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait. We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative. So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.

p_j_w 5y ago
There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the people involved took a rational/science minded approach and bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for others. >So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.
- Fomite 5y ago
  This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.
- bsder 5y ago
  > I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Holy hell this. I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like a bad flu." I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind. Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would teach them.

grawprog 5y ago

I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was hard to clear the congestion. It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time. It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again. We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.

cmbuck 5y ago
Have any of you get tested for antibodies?
- grawprog 5y ago
  I never did, i don't think any of us did. One of us ended up in close proximity however to someone who'd tested positive for covid, just prior to getting the results of their tests. This person did not get sick. That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing should be made of it unless that person were to ever be tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still can't draw any conclusions from it. Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020, just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not because I thought I already had it, but mostly because there's no point in worrying about something I can't change. If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened. I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having been following the rules fairly stringently would unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where I could be exposed for no real reason.
rhino369 5y ago

feral 5y ago

So many people, even here, read the article and are like "I knew I had covid that December, I had the weirdest cold". But actually this should make you suspicious of such anecdotes. There's just much too many of them for them all to be covid. So they really count as evidence that people just get weird colds and flus. And hence that the weird cold you had in November 2019 was just a weird non-covid cold.

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations? When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.
- el_benhameen 5y ago
  While I agree with the general point you and the op are making, I don’t think your specific assertion is correct. Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion; some people infect large numbers of other people, but most infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the people with these anecdotes didn’t infect anyone they know of is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I do think you’re correct that they didn’t have it).
- manwe150 5y ago
  I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might provide antibodies for some. We’ve seen that happen multiple times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin stories.
  - myfavoritedog 5y ago

felipellrocha 5y ago

My mother-in-law got a weird cold at around October where she lost her sense of smell for a few days.

passivate 5y ago
So did my brother in Jan 2021. Turns out it was sinus related :)

myfavoritedog 5y ago

I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted. The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often. I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had something that "surely might have been COVID".

wolverine876 5y ago
I have a weird itch on my a-- right now. It is the next pandemic.
giarc 5y ago
I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc). The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost every other resp virus has disappeared.
guilhas 5y ago
Last November/December was for me the strangest flu season ever, coughing and sneezing for abnormally long period, my coworkers and mother also. And after, in January, I got a really strange what looked like herpes in the face. Followed by finger infection which I had never had, which could mean my immune system was abnormally weak So that's that
- asdff 5y ago
  Thats another variable here. People get older and are more weak over time. Diseases hit you worse in your 30s than in your 20s. Health conditions also tend to crop up after a certain age, like heart conditions that you might blame on a vaccine instead of just you getting older and being predisposed to this condition.

reureu 5y ago

If you're reading this article and live in the US, you should really consider enrolling in the All of Us research study: https://www.joinallofus.org https://www.joinallofus.org It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many many others :)

dcolkitt 5y ago

I think this is a good argument for the government to start a program to do an ongoing “serological census”. On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If there’s ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of, this would give us the data before we’re even aware of its existence.

shalmanese 5y ago
That feels like a wonderfully efficient way to generate a continuously fertile crop of new conspiracy theories.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Here's a simple one: do we really trust a government agency (or hell, anyone really) to collect intimate and identifiable data about our bodies all while preserving anonymity and securing the data from nation state attackers? Do we trust nameless data scientists to run SQL queries over us that aren't intended to determine which ones of us will be smarter, stronger, more violent, etc? Do we trust politicians that have not yet been elected to office to use this data for benevolent purposes like our current politicians would (if we trust our current politicians)? Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester inside of concerned populations and spread to non-controversial parts of the government such as the post office and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a good chunk of Jews.
newsbinator 5y ago
I'm surprised they don't already do that?
- giarc 5y ago
  The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low. Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the population every month to catch a rare event like that.

throwawaysea 5y ago

There are thousands of travelers flying from China to the US every single day. It seems obvious that the earliest infections would be sooner than January 2020. I remain unsurprised by these new findings, because past conversations around this topic would always be shut down or dismissed, leading to no serious, balanced conversation. Common sense and reasonable speculation were met with vitriol and people tried to claim a moral high road of "trusting the science". Just like with the lab leak theory not actually being "debunked", this too is further evidence of how echo chambers, politics, and groupthink have corrupted discourse.

mumubro 5y ago
totally agree, it's funny seeing the idea that covid spread much earlier, which is completely reasonable, being dismissed.

at_a_remove 5y ago

I wish I had it on hand, but I have seen it more than once, including not long after it came out: in October 2019, one of the 4chan folks, one of the lab geeks, posted that they had seen a fairly unusual virus come trucking through in the SARS family. I saw the screenshot posted again around December. I would not be even a little shocked if it were kicking around in early 2019, or even before. Just think of how HIV was skulking about, smoldering, before really catching on the tinder.

gpcr1949 5y ago
here's the archived 4chan post [0]. The op is sort of ridiculous and not relevant, but the poster with id pUlkHE7L post some PCR stuff which is very strange to post at that date (21 october 2019 if the timestamps are correct). However, SARS-CoV-2 is 30kb not 35kb. [0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/ https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/
- mumubro 5y ago
  Not a big difference between 30kb and 35kb if running gel.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  That's the one! Yeah, the timestamps are right, that's when I remember seeing it. Thank you for finding it.

inglor_cz 5y ago

I, too, had a very bad cold in December 2019 and January 2020. With a lot of exhausting dry cough and no unusual bacteria cultivated from samples. Five weeks of utter misery. But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe back then must have been something else.

99_00 5y ago

The real timeline is most certainly earlier than the official one. https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649 https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1228435515776667649

WiSaGaN 5y ago
It was already reported in Chinese national TV on Dec 31, 2019 there was pneumonia with unclear reason: http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?id=Artisg2QlHWoHQixNnJMlIHb191231 http://app.cctv.com/special/cportal/detail/arti/index.html?i...

splithalf 5y ago

I thought I had covid before news of covid even came out. Was googling “novel pneumonia type illnesses” and reading about sequelae. I had had close contact with wuhan travelers in late dec. 2020. Mostly fatigue and headache for a week, then the lung issues started and lasted a month or more. A few weeks later the first couple of California cases from China presented at a local er. Few cared at that point as the politics were inverted early on due to the travel ban, and also the super bowl and impeachment vying for the public’s attention.

throwaway4good 5y ago

From the linked article: "Of the 24,079 study participants with blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi." So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or had the virus at that point. That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been spreading for a while.)

curiousllama 5y ago
> Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) That assumption is, uhm, doing a lot of work there
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Yeah, this is selecting for people participating in a medical study, it is far from a random sampling. Lots of very rural America would be ruled out, even if the study participants weren't all from traditional big cities. People that are less mobile also wouldn't participate, etc. Lots of people who wouldn't contract COVID early would also not be likely to participate in this kind of trial. Plus the positives in this case weren't all in January, they spread into March (by which point in time finding positives becomes much more likely). And that's aside from the difficulties with antibody testing and cross-reactivity -- although this study looks a lot better than the previous one.
infamouscow 5y ago
> Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) I can't think of anything more anti-science than dismissing data.
- abfan1127 5y ago
  how is he dismissing data? questionable data should be treated as such... why would a linear extrapolation be a good fit here?

kderbyma 5y ago

why is all this 'new information' the same information that was around last year?....like it's all about a year old.....I was reading articles about this last year in June...

sct202 5y ago

The PDF is at https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab519/6294073 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... : Some details of the positive test collection dates by state: *Illinois Jan 7, Jan 20, Jan 22, Feb 21, Feb 24 *Massachusetts Jan 8 *Wisconsin Feb 3 *Pennsylvania Feb 15 *Mississippi Mar 6 5 were Black, 2 were Latino/Hispanic, 2 were White Page 20 shows that there was a lot of unbalance for the states with samples. Texas for example only had 84 samples processed, but Illinois had 2,426.

teknopaul 5y ago
re:Black, Latino/Hispanic, White. Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. I had to ask if I was Hispanic. I speak Spanish, live in Spain but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. N. B. there is no reason for them to even ask if you are or are not. And no, I could not chose to be Hispanic: its a term assigned to you. Some Spanish nationals are Hispanic some are not. Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. It does not matter where you were born or the colour of your skin. Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for "lying" on the visa form. That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  Are you sure? Are the standards for who qualifies according to the law documented somewhere? I always thought that you’re legally able to self-identify however you deem accurate on those government forms in the U.S?
- Wohlf 5y ago
  Latino/Hispanic is not considered a race by the US government, it's an ethnic group. Latino covers all people of Latin descent including native Spaniards and Portuguese.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. No, its not. Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnic category independent of race. And it doesn’t mean “speaking Spanish”, it means: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” [0] > but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. Told by whom? Obviously this is deeply false. It also contradicts your later claim that: > Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. So, I'm not clear what your story is, is it that it is just an "official racist" code for "Mexican" or is it …something else? > Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for “lying” on the visa form. Neither the immigrant nor non-immigrant visa application form asks for ethnicity in general or Hispanic origin in particular. [1][2] [0] See, e.g., the Census page on it, even though the policy is government-wide where race/ethnic data is collected, under OMB directive: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/about.html https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/abo... [1] nonimmigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-Example_11012019.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-... [2] immigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.pdf https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.p...

donewithcoding 5y ago

My wife works in healthcare and caught some random respiratory illness in December 2019 that lingered on for 3 weeks. Her o2 levels the entire time was hanging around 94-96% so eventually we went to see her PCP. He found "adventitious" sounds in her lungs via stethoscope and prescribed her some steroids. It had an immediate effect and I thank god everyday she was diagnosed and treated before MSM made covid the black plague.

jupp0r 5y ago

The title should really be: as expected, no evidence of Coronavirus infections earlier than original Wuhan outbreak found in the US. With the amount of passenger flights leaving Wuhan daily, it's completely expected to see rapid spread in December, given the current theory of a November initial outbreak.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

In California we have lifted mask, and distancing requirements; in most situations. In all honesty, I didn't mind wearing a mask, and distancing. For one, I didn't have a cold, or flu, this winter. More importantly, and I'm probally in the minority; I have Never liked people I don't know getting to close to me be at DMV, Doctor's office, or the supermarket. Tipsy at the bar is another story. I was hoping social distancing would stick around after the panademic. I guess I'm a bit anti-social? I've noticed the vocal proponents of distancing, and mask wearing, are people whom salary depends on crowds, or packing people into small spaces. I watching Bill Maher right now. He was a big proponent of being safe. Now---he's on the opposite side. Why--he makes part of his living by crowding people into stadiums for his chuckle fest? Even before the pandemic, I always wondered why doctors were perfectly fine with having a waiting room with sick patients, all breathing the same air.

throwaway-7878 5y ago

For context, I don’t usually get sick, and if I do, I rarely if ever get seriously sick. I’ve been seriously sick a handful of times in my life and have definitely had the flu before. Nov. 13th, 2019, I started to come down with a pretty bad cold and left work early. My commute is along a popular train route from downtown to airport (lots of contact points during rush hour). My kids were also not feeling well and we went into the doctors that afternoon. The reaction was typical, “you’ve caught a virus, probably the flu.” At this point my wife was fine. For the next 5 days my fever started to increase and I was knocked out incapacitated. It was the worst that I had ever felt. I can safely say that you can eat jumbo freezies with a fever and won’t experience brain freeze. On Monday the 18th, I went back to the doctor and he listened to my chest and heard the distinctive crackling of pneumonia. He sent me for a chest x-ray and it came back positive. Immediately I was put on antibiotics. Note that I never felt in distress breathing. A few days later it wasn’t getting better, and I went back to the doctors. They increased my dose and also prescribed me a “superbug inhibitor”. I was out of commission for another week before I started to work from home and feeling better. Doctors told me I had bacterial pneumonia. No one did any real tests, nasal swabs, or blood. On Nov. 24th my wife came down with a terrible cold as we had plans to take our family to a theme park. This turned into a stressful trip because she came down sick mid-trip and needed Tylenol frequently. The kids at this point had not shown any real symptoms. Only mild symptoms that came and went. On November 30th, I went to the hospital to get checked out because I was scheduled to travel to re:Invent on Dec. 1st. The pneumonia was still present and they couldn’t tell if it were getting smaller or not (no baseline). They did take my blood though, although no one commented on it. Effectively the doctors told me I was good to travel. Doctors had conflicting opinions on whether I was contagious, or even whether I had a virus or bacterial infection. The double regime of antibiotics and “super bug inhibitor” seemed to do the trick for me. With that in hand I made the decision to travel to Las Vegas. Note that at this point I no idea about Covid-19 but over the next few weeks the reports started to come in, but I still didn’t think about myself being sick. At re:Invent, if you were there, I was the guy with the dry persistent cough which my doctor eventually labeled the “100-day cough” (no kidding). The trouble began almost immediately once I returned from the trip. People I had socialized with were telling me that I made them sick. That felt terrible, and I had been at work at this time and still coughing. Out of respect for folks I decided to work from home for the next couple of weeks. The team I had sat near, then reported all coming down with a terrible cold that weekend. This is all anecdotal of course and no one else I knew came down with pneumonia. Around mid-December I took time off until the new year and effectively sequestered with my family. The only time I felt the pneumonia was when I exerted myself physically. It felt like pressure on my chest. It was still visible on a CT scan in March 2020 when I was admitted to hospital over a potential concern of Covid due to travel (paranoia). I tested negative for Covid via a nasal swab. Work Travel Timeline: - In early November to Minnesota - In December to Las Vegas - In January to London - In late Feb / early March to NYC I came home from NYC just as reports were surfacing of a man getting sick near Times Square, where I had been located. All the while the Covid reporting / story was unfolding. The “joke” was that I was probably patient zero. This is not a funny joke. There is some trust that our medical doctors will do the right thing and we have sentinel programs in place. What struck me about the Covid reporting was how it was presented in the Lancet and immediately became political. Doctors are reporting cases of “pneumonia with unknown origin.” This got me thinking, none of the doctors that investigated me collected blood or nasal swabs. It was all shrugged off as being “flu” or “bacterial pneumonia” a result of “flu.” IIRC there were reports of 2019/2020 being a bad flu season. My thanks go out to the brave Chinese doctors that first identified the gene sequence and shared the data in an effort to prevent pandemic. You are heroes, even if our governments dropped the ball and we’re incapable of making tough decisions based on a lack of early and lagging data in some cases, or because they didn’t share enough data. When we started to hear about antibody tests, and sewage testing being able to show community spread I was certain we would detect Covid in Nov/Dec in NA by looking back. I’m not convinced this testing ever really happened only because I “really expect we would find traces.” At this point we had just entered lockdown (March 2020) and I still haven’t gotten my hair cut. We still don’t know the origins of Covid but we are all told that it started in Wuhan. The first cases were all people who had travelled to or come into contact with people from Wuhan. The serious cases were all mostly associated with elder case homes. Was it a lab accident, or a cave, or an animal that mated with a bat from a cave? Then there is all of us who have this collective experience of thinking we had Covid back in late 2019 / early 2020. Probably not?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

voidfunc 5y ago

Everything unfolded so quickly last year… late Feb I went through SeaTac twice for work travel. By St. Patricks day my state was in full lockdown and there were TP and sanitizer shortages. I think a week later my company shutdown its HQ campus and specifically one of the buildings I had been a month earlier was a super-spreader site. Everything seemed so normal in Jan/Early Feb 2020…