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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 suspici

by 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
    We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main outbreak.
    - eindiran 5y ago
      There have been many variants that emerged in the US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think perhaps the impression that there haven't been any variants stems from the fact that none of the big variants of concern have been from the US, which appears to have just been luck. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-variants-united-states-of-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-varian...
  - Izkata 5y ago
    > I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. This is from late last year, an article that attempted to group the mutations into "L", "G", "S", "O", etc, strains: https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yxmpjqkdzvr/ https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yx... You can see where it compares infections to proportion of strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7 countries listed here, but I think I remember a different article that had more, and the pattern was pretty consistent.
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but being it was the first time in years I had been sick I decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for the anti-bodies. >why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations? This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically the news alone could be responsible for increased stress, much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data available regarding certain bio markers like increased cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases before the media reporting). But let’s say for example where media ( I suppose backed by statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.
- mariodiana 5y ago
  Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24 thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass outbreak.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these superspreaders.
    - simonh 5y ago
      This is why Italy got absolutely hammered quite early on. They were very unlucky to get hit by the mother of all super spreader events. Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France had a few cases before then, but it died out.
ssully 5y ago
I just think most people haven't actually had a bad case of the flu or a respiratory illness before. So people who did around November/December assume it must have been covid, when they most likely just caught something that people usually catch around that time of year.
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it feels like to be very ill. If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.
  - lottin 5y ago
    Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39 years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year, but the flu only once in my entire life.
    - wearywanderer 5y ago
      Influenza is rare? Maybe rare for you if you habitually get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very common, most people have experienced it.
      - nl 5y ago
        This is correct. Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038 on average, about 8% of the U.S. population gets sick from flu each season, with a range of between 3% and 11%, depending on the season. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm
throwkeep 5y ago
It would be interesting to see how many of those who thought they had it prior to Feb/March 2020 ended up getting Covid later, as it would mostly rule those anecdotes out.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  It's kinda too late now though, since most of those people are vaccinated now so they'll have antibodies already, right?
  - majormajor 5y ago
    My understanding is that the vaccine will create antibodies for the spike protein (since that's been the thing the vaccines reproduce to train the immune system on) but not the nucleocapsid protein. https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/covid-19-antibody-testing-s-vs-n-protein-340327 https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/covid-19...
- majormajor 5y ago
  I was one of those "I got something weird in late Feb 2020, maybe it was an early Covid case!" people, so I got an antibody test in April or May of last year, when they became easy to get. Nothing - so yeah, must've just been a weird cold of some sort. It was strange since it didn't have the runny nose or head congestion, but was predominantly breathing/cough related.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    There was definitely something going around late 2019/early 2020. I had it, and so did many people I know. But it's very unlikely it was Covid, because Covid is much more infectious and more deadly than both colds and flu. People weren't masking or taking any precautions then, so Covid would have spread very quickly indeed. And that would have created an obvious medical emergency, with hospitals at full capacity and a clear peak in unexpected deaths. Relatively minor symptoms, no huge increase in hospitalisations, and no huge peak in deaths all suggest Covid wasn't the culprit.
nend 5y ago
There's a lot of confirmation bias in this thread for sure. I thought I had COVID around February/March 2020. Roughly a year ago antibody tests became readily available, so I got one, and it came back negative. There was a strain of the flu going around during the winter of 2019-2020 that was not protected against by the flu vaccine, that I suspect is contributing to a lot of the confirmation bias (and I'm guessing is what I had at the time). I'm honestly surprised there's so many people in this thread who think they had COVID but never got the antibody test. They're cheap and quick, and if you could have confirmed you had COVID antibodies, at least for me that would have been a huge stress reliever during the last 12-18 months of pandemic lockdowns.
throwawayboise 5y ago
I was pretty sure I had COVID in November '20. Everyone else in my household had it, and we didn't isolate from each other really stringently. I had a mild sore throat for a couple of days. Never got tested because I was "quarantined" anyway for the close contacts. Finally I went and got a COVID antibody test to satisfy my curiosity, which was negative on all factors. I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation if I was infected. Seems to me it would not, but that's not based on any really informed judgment.
- asdff 5y ago
  People still have antibodies from 2003 SARS infections, I don't think you've had COVID.
  - abfan1127 5y ago
    antibody tests are really hard. his could be a false negative. further, he could have had it, but without antibodies. or he might have had something else.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      If he didn’t have antibodies then how did he ever recover? Surely the thing doesn’t just burn itself out. Without anything to fight it, won’t it just continually infect him?
      - abfan1127 5y ago
        some people are recovering through other responses, including t-cell response, etc. I don't have the academic experience, the clinic experience, or his specific medical history, so I can't speak specifically. I do recall lots of papers at the beginning of Covid talking about high t-cell responses in patients without a lingering anti-body response. That all could have been early science based on poor data as well though.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
A colleague and his wife became 'sicker than we've ever been' in late December, 2019, within a week of him transiting in the business lounge in Vancouver airport, on his way to San Jose. He notes that a passenger flight from Wuhan landed in Vancouver at the same time and transit passengers from that flight enjoyed the same buffet. His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  "Sicker than you've ever been" isn't a medical diagnosis. I got absolutely royally fucked up by influenza and "sicker than I've ever been in my adult life" -- and I'm 49 -- but it was Jan 2019 not Dec 2019, so I'm pretty certain it wasn't COVID. Probably 5% of the population every winter gets "sicker than they've ever been in their adult life" with some horrible influenza/bronchitis/pneumonia. If everyone who got "sicker than they've ever been" in Dec 2019 were actually sick with COVID then January would have decimated long term care facilities around the United States. Instead you can't see any upward trend in excess mortality in Jan. If anything Jan and Feb were slightly low and the trend doesn't become apparent until late March.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    So in my case, I was tested for influenza, got negative, and they told me it was a virus ...that they didn't know what it was. My guess is now they know what it was.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      The false negative rate of the rapid influenza test is around 50%. It can tell you that you have influenza but it can't tell you that you don't have it. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_guidance_ridt.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_gu... There's also a lot of other cold and flu viruses other than influenza, and just a normal rhinhovirus cold virus can cause bronchitis or pneumonia.
renewiltord 5y ago
I was at a party during the COVID-19 crisis and felt “sicker than I’ve ever been”. Got tests after I’d isolated. No antibodies. God damn it. Imagine getting that sick with a cold and then it not even giving you immunity to anything worthwhile.
- nradov 5y ago
  Well you probably now have some level of immunity to that particular cold virus. So you're much less likely to have type of cold again. There are dozens of different viruses that can cause common cold symptoms.
derivagral 5y ago
As someone who returned from Shanghai in mid-November with a light cough that worsened into a diagnosed "upper-respiratory viral infection" for ~3 weeks of misery on the couch... I wish I could confirm one way or the other!
- lamontcg 5y ago
  You almost certainly didn't have it. In mid-November there could have only been cryptic spread around Wuhan. That means that maybe at the outside 3,000 people around Wuhan had the virus at that point (which I'm likely being generous with that number). Your chances of having contracted it in Shanghai is low. 3,000 people sounds like a lot but China has a population of 1.4 billion people. Your odds are 1-in-500,000 -- and they're much lower given the geographical separation from Wuhan to Shanghai. You had a cold which developed into bronchitis. Now if you told me it was mid-January and that you lost your sense of smell so completely that you couldn't smell food burning on the stove and when it came back meat taste rancid, I'd agree you probably had it.
  - neffy 5y ago
    There is various evidence kicking around of cases in Wuhan back as far as September, so it's not entirely out of the frame.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      No it pretty much is out of the frame. I'm allowing for 3,000 active cases in mid-November in Wuhan. It is expected that "patient zero" was closer to September, and I'm aware of the evidence from WHO and the genetic "dating" that leads to September/October timeframes for when it emerged. That still doesn't get it all over Shanghai by mid-November. And if there were more than 3,000 cases in mid-November the problem with the way the virus doubles every 3 days and kills about 1% (particularly before we knew anything about it) is that if you increase that number then you wind up with bodies stacking up way too high. And now if you assume that there was more than cryptic spread in literally a handful of people in Shanghai in mid-November then by mid-January it would have been slaughtering people in Shanghai in a way that couldn't have been hidden, and Shanghai would have looked like Wuhan wound up looking. And taking 3,000 active cases in Wuhan in mid-November you get 3,000,000 cases in mid-December after exponential growth, which is 35% of the population which is way over the 7% seroprevalence in April 2020. Once this virus really gets going it doesn't hide. It can only be around in a population for about 2 months before the bodies really stack up and you cannot miss it (it was probably around Wuhan a bit longer than 2 months without detection because the progenitor virus strain was less well adapted).
bigpumpkin 5y ago
The CDC’s Dr. Thornburg and Josh Denny, chief executive of the NIH’s All of Us program and an author of the latest study, both said they don’t plan to search blood samples earlier than December 2019, given how few they have found back then. “We’ve seen a very low rate of positivity in this time period,” [1] [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illinois-to-massachusetts-before-states-reported-first-cases-11623762001?mod=hp_lead_pos10 https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi... Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.
- xienze 5y ago
  > Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated. Because if people found out that Covid had been spreading in the US for months before the “official” starting date of March 2020, they’d come to realize that they would have never even realized there was a pandemic going on were it not for the media attention.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The lack of ICU beds might have been a clue...
lambda 5y ago
Yeah. My problem is that my "really bad cold that lingered" was in February 2020. That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say. I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been struggling more with concentration issues and depression since then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation in the US, etc. The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.
- MertsA 5y ago
  >The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China. I had a viral illness back in July with symptoms that couldn't rule out Covid-19. I went to get tested the very next day as soon as I possibly could have and quarantined while I waited. At the time I got tested I was told the backlog was on the order of 3-5 days for Quest. I ended quarantine 2 weeks later, not because I got test results back, but because they waited so long that even if it came back positive I already met the CDC guidelines to end quarantine regardless. Rather than processing the tests they could manage in a timely fashion they were wasting tests on samples so old it didn't even matter what the result was. Rather than a priority queue they should have been handling tests like a priority stack. I'm sure it would suck to be told "sorry we're not going to check your sample, assume it's positive" but at least then you could manage quarantine and contact tracing in a timely manner instead of waiting so long it's basically useless. Not to mention the government no doubt paid Quest for all of those useless tests vs. Quest only getting paid for the amount they could do in a timely manner. Doing it a reasonable way would just be throwing money away for them.
8note 5y ago
I didn't have any particularly weird colds, but I had a fever far too many times between late 2019 and early 2020
notatoad 5y ago
i had a weird flu in april 2020, right as the covid panic really began in my region. knocked me out for 2 weeks, i lost almost 10kg, sickest i've been in a long time. ticked off every box on the list of covid symptoms. but the PCR test said it wasn't covid, and it can't have been all that contagious because neither of my roommates got sick. so yeah, sometimes people just get sick.
chrismcb 5y ago
My anecdote... I thought I might have got it in Jan 2020. Keep in mind I frequent a fast food place that is across the nursing home that had one of usa's first deaths, at about the same time. It definitely felt different than other times I got the flu. And then about six months later I actually got covid. Will the only difference in symptoms was I was very sore with covid. And it took at least a month to recover.
void_mint 5y ago
"I got super sick during flu season, it must have been covid!" Or, you know, the most obvious thing. You had the flu, during flu season.
ithkuil 5y ago
The possibility of having contracted it crossed my mind since I had a bad "cold" on January 2020. But a year later I got an antibody test that showed no prior infection. Like the nice song from They Bay be Giants "Put it to the test" says: A fact is just a fantasy Unless it can be checked
Apofis 5y ago
It's interesting that this is a popular enough sentiment to be a pattern.

by feral 5y ago

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
  We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main outbreak.
  - eindiran 5y ago
    There have been many variants that emerged in the US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think perhaps the impression that there haven't been any variants stems from the fact that none of the big variants of concern have been from the US, which appears to have just been luck. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-variants-united-states-of-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-varian...
- Izkata 5y ago
  > I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. This is from late last year, an article that attempted to group the mutations into "L", "G", "S", "O", etc, strains: https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yxmpjqkdzvr/ https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yx... You can see where it compares infections to proportion of strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7 countries listed here, but I think I remember a different article that had more, and the pattern was pretty consistent.
throwawaycities 5y ago
First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but being it was the first time in years I had been sick I decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for the anti-bodies. >why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations? This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically the news alone could be responsible for increased stress, much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data available regarding certain bio markers like increased cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases before the media reporting). But let’s say for example where media ( I suppose backed by statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.
mariodiana 5y ago
Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24 thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass outbreak.
- Izkata 5y ago
  Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these superspreaders.
  - simonh 5y ago
    This is why Italy got absolutely hammered quite early on. They were very unlucky to get hit by the mother of all super spreader events. Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France had a few cases before then, but it died out.

ssully 5y ago

I just think most people haven't actually had a bad case of the flu or a respiratory illness before. So people who did around November/December assume it must have been covid, when they most likely just caught something that people usually catch around that time of year.

wearywanderer 5y ago
I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it feels like to be very ill. If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.
- lottin 5y ago
  Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39 years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year, but the flu only once in my entire life.
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    Influenza is rare? Maybe rare for you if you habitually get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very common, most people have experienced it.
    - nl 5y ago
      This is correct. Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038 on average, about 8% of the U.S. population gets sick from flu each season, with a range of between 3% and 11%, depending on the season. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

throwkeep 5y ago

It would be interesting to see how many of those who thought they had it prior to Feb/March 2020 ended up getting Covid later, as it would mostly rule those anecdotes out.

EamonnMR 5y ago
It's kinda too late now though, since most of those people are vaccinated now so they'll have antibodies already, right?
- majormajor 5y ago
  My understanding is that the vaccine will create antibodies for the spike protein (since that's been the thing the vaccines reproduce to train the immune system on) but not the nucleocapsid protein. https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/covid-19-antibody-testing-s-vs-n-protein-340327 https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/covid-19...
majormajor 5y ago
I was one of those "I got something weird in late Feb 2020, maybe it was an early Covid case!" people, so I got an antibody test in April or May of last year, when they became easy to get. Nothing - so yeah, must've just been a weird cold of some sort. It was strange since it didn't have the runny nose or head congestion, but was predominantly breathing/cough related.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  There was definitely something going around late 2019/early 2020. I had it, and so did many people I know. But it's very unlikely it was Covid, because Covid is much more infectious and more deadly than both colds and flu. People weren't masking or taking any precautions then, so Covid would have spread very quickly indeed. And that would have created an obvious medical emergency, with hospitals at full capacity and a clear peak in unexpected deaths. Relatively minor symptoms, no huge increase in hospitalisations, and no huge peak in deaths all suggest Covid wasn't the culprit.

nend 5y ago

There's a lot of confirmation bias in this thread for sure. I thought I had COVID around February/March 2020. Roughly a year ago antibody tests became readily available, so I got one, and it came back negative. There was a strain of the flu going around during the winter of 2019-2020 that was not protected against by the flu vaccine, that I suspect is contributing to a lot of the confirmation bias (and I'm guessing is what I had at the time). I'm honestly surprised there's so many people in this thread who think they had COVID but never got the antibody test. They're cheap and quick, and if you could have confirmed you had COVID antibodies, at least for me that would have been a huge stress reliever during the last 12-18 months of pandemic lockdowns.

throwawayboise 5y ago

I was pretty sure I had COVID in November '20. Everyone else in my household had it, and we didn't isolate from each other really stringently. I had a mild sore throat for a couple of days. Never got tested because I was "quarantined" anyway for the close contacts. Finally I went and got a COVID antibody test to satisfy my curiosity, which was negative on all factors. I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation if I was infected. Seems to me it would not, but that's not based on any really informed judgment.

asdff 5y ago
People still have antibodies from 2003 SARS infections, I don't think you've had COVID.
- abfan1127 5y ago
  antibody tests are really hard. his could be a false negative. further, he could have had it, but without antibodies. or he might have had something else.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    If he didn’t have antibodies then how did he ever recover? Surely the thing doesn’t just burn itself out. Without anything to fight it, won’t it just continually infect him?
    - abfan1127 5y ago
      some people are recovering through other responses, including t-cell response, etc. I don't have the academic experience, the clinic experience, or his specific medical history, so I can't speak specifically. I do recall lots of papers at the beginning of Covid talking about high t-cell responses in patients without a lingering anti-body response. That all could have been early science based on poor data as well though.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

A colleague and his wife became 'sicker than we've ever been' in late December, 2019, within a week of him transiting in the business lounge in Vancouver airport, on his way to San Jose. He notes that a passenger flight from Wuhan landed in Vancouver at the same time and transit passengers from that flight enjoyed the same buffet. His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.

lamontcg 5y ago
"Sicker than you've ever been" isn't a medical diagnosis. I got absolutely royally fucked up by influenza and "sicker than I've ever been in my adult life" -- and I'm 49 -- but it was Jan 2019 not Dec 2019, so I'm pretty certain it wasn't COVID. Probably 5% of the population every winter gets "sicker than they've ever been in their adult life" with some horrible influenza/bronchitis/pneumonia. If everyone who got "sicker than they've ever been" in Dec 2019 were actually sick with COVID then January would have decimated long term care facilities around the United States. Instead you can't see any upward trend in excess mortality in Jan. If anything Jan and Feb were slightly low and the trend doesn't become apparent until late March.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  So in my case, I was tested for influenza, got negative, and they told me it was a virus ...that they didn't know what it was. My guess is now they know what it was.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    The false negative rate of the rapid influenza test is around 50%. It can tell you that you have influenza but it can't tell you that you don't have it. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_guidance_ridt.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_gu... There's also a lot of other cold and flu viruses other than influenza, and just a normal rhinhovirus cold virus can cause bronchitis or pneumonia.

renewiltord 5y ago

I was at a party during the COVID-19 crisis and felt “sicker than I’ve ever been”. Got tests after I’d isolated. No antibodies. God damn it. Imagine getting that sick with a cold and then it not even giving you immunity to anything worthwhile.

nradov 5y ago
Well you probably now have some level of immunity to that particular cold virus. So you're much less likely to have type of cold again. There are dozens of different viruses that can cause common cold symptoms.

derivagral 5y ago

As someone who returned from Shanghai in mid-November with a light cough that worsened into a diagnosed "upper-respiratory viral infection" for ~3 weeks of misery on the couch... I wish I could confirm one way or the other!

lamontcg 5y ago
You almost certainly didn't have it. In mid-November there could have only been cryptic spread around Wuhan. That means that maybe at the outside 3,000 people around Wuhan had the virus at that point (which I'm likely being generous with that number). Your chances of having contracted it in Shanghai is low. 3,000 people sounds like a lot but China has a population of 1.4 billion people. Your odds are 1-in-500,000 -- and they're much lower given the geographical separation from Wuhan to Shanghai. You had a cold which developed into bronchitis. Now if you told me it was mid-January and that you lost your sense of smell so completely that you couldn't smell food burning on the stove and when it came back meat taste rancid, I'd agree you probably had it.
- neffy 5y ago
  There is various evidence kicking around of cases in Wuhan back as far as September, so it's not entirely out of the frame.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    No it pretty much is out of the frame. I'm allowing for 3,000 active cases in mid-November in Wuhan. It is expected that "patient zero" was closer to September, and I'm aware of the evidence from WHO and the genetic "dating" that leads to September/October timeframes for when it emerged. That still doesn't get it all over Shanghai by mid-November. And if there were more than 3,000 cases in mid-November the problem with the way the virus doubles every 3 days and kills about 1% (particularly before we knew anything about it) is that if you increase that number then you wind up with bodies stacking up way too high. And now if you assume that there was more than cryptic spread in literally a handful of people in Shanghai in mid-November then by mid-January it would have been slaughtering people in Shanghai in a way that couldn't have been hidden, and Shanghai would have looked like Wuhan wound up looking. And taking 3,000 active cases in Wuhan in mid-November you get 3,000,000 cases in mid-December after exponential growth, which is 35% of the population which is way over the 7% seroprevalence in April 2020. Once this virus really gets going it doesn't hide. It can only be around in a population for about 2 months before the bodies really stack up and you cannot miss it (it was probably around Wuhan a bit longer than 2 months without detection because the progenitor virus strain was less well adapted).

bigpumpkin 5y ago

The CDC’s Dr. Thornburg and Josh Denny, chief executive of the NIH’s All of Us program and an author of the latest study, both said they don’t plan to search blood samples earlier than December 2019, given how few they have found back then. “We’ve seen a very low rate of positivity in this time period,” [1] [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illinois-to-massachusetts-before-states-reported-first-cases-11623762001?mod=hp_lead_pos10 https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi... Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.

xienze 5y ago
> Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated. Because if people found out that Covid had been spreading in the US for months before the “official” starting date of March 2020, they’d come to realize that they would have never even realized there was a pandemic going on were it not for the media attention.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The lack of ICU beds might have been a clue...

lambda 5y ago

Yeah. My problem is that my "really bad cold that lingered" was in February 2020. That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say. I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been struggling more with concentration issues and depression since then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation in the US, etc. The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.

MertsA 5y ago
>The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China. I had a viral illness back in July with symptoms that couldn't rule out Covid-19. I went to get tested the very next day as soon as I possibly could have and quarantined while I waited. At the time I got tested I was told the backlog was on the order of 3-5 days for Quest. I ended quarantine 2 weeks later, not because I got test results back, but because they waited so long that even if it came back positive I already met the CDC guidelines to end quarantine regardless. Rather than processing the tests they could manage in a timely fashion they were wasting tests on samples so old it didn't even matter what the result was. Rather than a priority queue they should have been handling tests like a priority stack. I'm sure it would suck to be told "sorry we're not going to check your sample, assume it's positive" but at least then you could manage quarantine and contact tracing in a timely manner instead of waiting so long it's basically useless. Not to mention the government no doubt paid Quest for all of those useless tests vs. Quest only getting paid for the amount they could do in a timely manner. Doing it a reasonable way would just be throwing money away for them.

8note 5y ago

I didn't have any particularly weird colds, but I had a fever far too many times between late 2019 and early 2020

notatoad 5y ago

i had a weird flu in april 2020, right as the covid panic really began in my region. knocked me out for 2 weeks, i lost almost 10kg, sickest i've been in a long time. ticked off every box on the list of covid symptoms. but the PCR test said it wasn't covid, and it can't have been all that contagious because neither of my roommates got sick. so yeah, sometimes people just get sick.

chrismcb 5y ago

My anecdote... I thought I might have got it in Jan 2020. Keep in mind I frequent a fast food place that is across the nursing home that had one of usa's first deaths, at about the same time. It definitely felt different than other times I got the flu. And then about six months later I actually got covid. Will the only difference in symptoms was I was very sore with covid. And it took at least a month to recover.

void_mint 5y ago

"I got super sick during flu season, it must have been covid!" Or, you know, the most obvious thing. You had the flu, during flu season.

ithkuil 5y ago

The possibility of having contracted it crossed my mind since I had a bad "cold" on January 2020. But a year later I got an antibody test that showed no prior infection. Like the nice song from They Bay be Giants "Put it to the test" says: A fact is just a fantasy Unless it can be checked

Apofis 5y ago

It's interesting that this is a popular enough sentiment to be a pattern.