13 ms·

Positive Covid-19 antigen tests with Norwegian blood samples from 2019

31 points by tomashm 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago
There was another one in France a while back. I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all) But given that we only seen 2 samples among millions, could this simply be an error? Like test errors, mislabelled or the sample being infected at a later point?
- martini333 5y ago
  The Norwegian study found covid antigen in 98 out of 6520 samples.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Ah, you are correct. IIRC the French study was a single sample. On the other hand, I feel 98 indicates a wide spread in Norway and probably in whole Europe. But that doesn't match the picture we had in EU around January-February.
    - estaseuropano 5y ago
      This is an insane proportion and the virus would have been picked up much earlier in a place like Norway which does lots of testing and flu sampling.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    Those 6250 samples were mostly from 2020, and the positive samples were almost entirely late 2020. Only one of the positives was from December 2019.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    98/6520 is about 1.5 percent. What is the false-positive rate for the antigen tests? Have the affected blood samples been verified by PCR testing?
    - martini333 5y ago
      No idea. But 98/6520 is more than 2 out of millions.
      - egberts1 5y ago
        and a lot closer to 1 out of 650.
    - rsfern 5y ago
      It’s most likely too late for PCR confirmation with these samples, there would need to be actual viral proteins in the blood sample, so an active or very recent infection at the time of the blood draw
  - aaron695 5y ago
- smt88 5y ago
  I don't know why you think this means it didn't originate in Wuhan. It just means it was outside China earlier than we've thought. We already know the CCP suppressed research into the virus and blocked news of its spread early on. There's no reason to believe them when they tell us the date they discovered Covid.
- netsharc 5y ago
  These findings aren't smoking gun evidence that "Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all". The rumor of the "new pneumonia" was going around between doctors in Wuhan in November 2019 [1]. It's conceivable that there were people who travelled from Wuhan to Europe in November/December, and that the virus was actually in Europe before it was officially found. Of course it could've come via humans from somewhere else to Wuhan (a good scientist doesn't dismiss hypotheses), but for sure the first outbreak was there. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7378494/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7378494/
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  > I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all) I do wonder (honestly, not rhetorically), if the virus emerged somewhere outside of China, what are the odds of the first major outbreak being in Wuhan? Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time? Perhaps the presence of cases outside of China this early on simply means Covid was simmering, and spilling out, earlier than we thought.
  - blagie 5y ago
    Well, a few explanations I can think of: 1) Covid19 was circulating, but had it's first outbreak in Wuhan due to things like population density 2) Covid19 was circulating earlier than China informed the world know (I'm not claiming grand conspiracy here to keep things secret; the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while) 3) There were other coronaviruses with the same or similar proteins elsewhere. I'm leaning towards #3. It makes a heck of a lot of sense for a lot of things unexplainable with SARS-COV2. If there was a mild cold circulating similar to SARS-COV2, but less deadly and less contagious, it'd explain a lot of the epidemiology (for example, why waves break so early, rather than infecting 70-90% of the population).
    - tremon 5y ago
      the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while It's even simpler than that: there was no need to figure anything out. If a few people present with flu-like symptoms but appear to suffer above average from it, Occam's conclusion would be that those people may have had an underlying condition that exacerbated the severity of their flu. There is zero need to go looking for zebra's until you identify a cluster of similar cases that all have above-average severity.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    > Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time? It's a difficult question to answer (and ask?), and we may never find the real answer. Coincidence, chance, luck? For now though, for all intents and purposes, Wuhan was ground zero and the first public cases in Italy and - I don't know, possibly these ones in Norway - can be traced back to Wuhan.
caaqil 5y ago
English version: https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/covid-19-was-discovered-in-blood-samples-stored-in-norway-as-early-as-2019-articleshow.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/covid-19-was...
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Note this article is just a rehash of a Sputnik article. Sputnik is the prime example of a propaganda outlet and well known for pushing wrong, madr up or heavily biased and unreflective articles (also known as 'fake news' in the original sense of lies and deception, rather than the modern American 'things I don't like are fake news' sense). I have not read the original paper so cannot comment on substance, but don't believe a word of this.
  - caaqil 5y ago
    I already read the submitted article using Google Translate, and the article I linked here basically contains the same information, just in English. You can confirm this by simply reading the original with the help of Google Translate.
makoto12 5y ago
My partner and myself got very sick on holiday in Germany, December 2019. Didn't think too much of it, until the symptoms of Covid started getting published and they all sounded eerily familiar. By the time antibody tests were available in my country it was too late. But no doubt in my mind it was covid. This just adds evidence to that fact
- hgibbs 5y ago
  But the symptoms of covid are very similar to e.g. the flu, and this would make you and your partner some of the first people on Europe to have had covid (given exponential increase in case counts it cannot have circulated for long before early 2020). My prior on anybody having covid in Europe in Dec 2019 is extremely low, I think yours should be too - just having been really sick is no evidence at all.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  There are hundreds of similar diseases, in particular in the set of flu strains that are endemic. These can hit you hard with very similar symptoms.
  - makoto12 5y ago
    maybe you're right. but loss of taste and smell. sick for 2 weeks and symptoms that persisted for 6+ months, obviously can't prove anything, but everything was suspiciously similar to covid. So it doesn't surprise me to see covid being found in dec 2019 samples in europe
    - pergadad 5y ago
      I cannot claim any special expertise on this but the CDC lists loss of taste and smell as a common symptom of flu and covid. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm
      - makoto12 5y ago
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Anecdata, not sure who to report this to for investigative purposes: 1. Teresa from Rako Science saliva testing station used to work as Air New Zealand cabin crew. With 5 other crew members, they went to Shanghai, and also stayed in the Grand Hyatt hotel opposite Taipei 101 in October 2019. They went to a nearby night market, presumably Taipei Hwahsi Tourist Night Market (which I went to on 2009-09-04, and had a lovely time). After that visit, they all had a respiratory infection similar to a bad flu, which didn't clear up after the doctor provided steroids and iron supplements, and they have had recurrences since then, roughly every 4 months. They're pretty sure in retrospect that they know what it was. To my knowledge, this is earlier than any confirmed WHO reports, at least as far as Wikipedia goes. 2. Mum reports that mum & dad's neighbours also report a bad flu in October/November 2019 in the Pays de Gex, near Geneva, Switzerland.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  This is nonsense. There are plenty of diseases with similar symptoms. I will report your post as probable astroturfing, the weird detail without actual evidence or source and pointing to Taipei suggests makes evident your motives. There is no substance or value to this post, except to.spread unfounded and untraceable conspiracy theories.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    Apparently you don't realize this, but peterburkimsher has some personal connections to Taiwan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400350 I'd like to say that jumping from a single post to conclusions about the posters motives makes something evident about you, but I don't feel like looking at your posting history to find out what it could be.
- drran 5y ago
  «bad flu» -> «swine flu»
K0nserv 5y ago
I'm not Norwegian(Swedish) and as far as I understand the article makes no mention of antigen tests. The article is talking about *antibodies* being found in blood tests from December 2019. I think the title should be changed, if someone who speaks Norwegian can weigh in that'd be helpful. This section is also interesting Det er også tidligere i pandemien påvist at koronaviruset sirkulerte i Italia i 2019, så tidlig som i september 2019, viser en italiensk studie fra Milano. Forskere har påpekt at viruset trolig også sirkulerte i kinesiske Wuhan lenge før det ble offisielt påvist. Hovedteorien er fortsatt at viruset først spredte seg der. Translated it says roughly: It has also been proven, earlier in the pandemic, that COVID19 was circulating in Italy in 2019, as early as September, according to an Italian study from Milano. Scientist have pointed out that the virus likely circulated in Wuhan a long time before it was officially detected[påvist, unsure if this is "proven"]. The leading theory remains that the virus originated there. See also, danielskogly's comment below.
- Aldipower 5y ago
  If this is correct, people having antibodies, then it would be even more interesting, imho.
- danielskogly 5y ago
  You're correct that the article doesn't mention antigen tests, ~~but the actual study[0] does~~: Edit: Apparantly the described test[1] is indeed for antibodies. See child comment by projektfu. > Summary: > We studied SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in Norway by including all women who were first trimester pregnant (n=6520), each month from December 2019 through December 2020, in the catchment region of Norway’s second largest hospital. We used sera that had been frozen stored after compulsory testing for syphilis antibodies in antenatal care. The sera were analyzed with the Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay (Roche Diagnostics, Cobas e801). This immunoassay detects IgG/IgM against SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/prevalence-of-antibodies-against-sarscov2-among-pregnant-women-in-norway-during-the-period-december-2019-through-december-2020/0178544CC4F04FC0A55C7B0BD5F28AB8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [1] https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Blueprint/en/pdf/cps/Elecsys-Anti-SARS-CoV-2-S-factsheet-SEPT-2020-2.pdf https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Bluepr...
zosima 5y ago
This is not blood samples that are positive for antigen, but blood samples that contain covid-19 reactive antibodies. Now, cross-reactive antibodies is a thing, so I wouldn't pay a lot of attention to these number unless they can show that e.g. blood from 2017 had much less covid-19-reactive antibodies than the blood from 2019.
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  This seems to be the only comment on this thread making sense.
- jsnell 5y ago
  Yeah, this is just crazy. They had blood samples going back five years, and did not run any earlier samples for calibration. But the paper claims the test has a specificity of 99.8% and the positive rate until March is 0.2% -- just the expected date of false positives.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Doesn't that requirement implicitly assume that SARS-CoV-2 prevalence grew linearly over time? What if 2017 had equal prevalence to 2019?
  - jsnell 5y ago
    Of course not linear. The growth would be exponential. It is impossible for Covid to have existed in humans in 2017. You would need to explain how that exponential growth was invisible for years, and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019. 2017 and 2019 did indeed have the same prevalence in Europe: 0%.
    - drran 5y ago
      > and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019. September 16, 2019? It's easy: blast at BSL4 lab «Vector». «On September 16th, 2019, an explosion occurred at the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology building (Vector) in the city of Koltsovo, in the Novosiberisk region of Siberia, Russia (1). The affected building was a BSL 4 virology research centre, and one of only two known sites housing variola virus, the cause of smallpox. The facility has one of the largest collections of dangerous pathogens in the world. Whilst laboratory safety breaches are common and do not usually result in epidemics, explosions are rare. Unlike a needlestick injury or an accidental shipping of live anthrax, an explosion of this magnitude is likely to lead to a physical breach of the integrity of the laboratory, possibly affecting multiple parts of the structure and equipment within. An explosion is sudden, uncontrolled and unpredictable, and involves force which may result in pathogen release into the surrounding environment. An epidemic which arises in close proximity to the explosion could spread beyond the affected region or even globally, which makes this event a concern for global public health.» https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/
danielskogly 5y ago
Actual study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/prevalence-of-antibodies-against-sarscov2-among-pregnant-women-in-norway-during-the-period-december-2019-through-december-2020/0178544CC4F04FC0A55C7B0BD5F28AB8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... Original press release: https://www.ahus.no/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norge-allerede-i-2019 https://www.ahus.no/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norg... Google translated version: https://www-ahus-no.translate.goog/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norge-allerede-i-2019?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-ahus-no.translate.goog/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan...
- T-A 5y ago
  Thanks. From the press release: Rundt 500 prøver per måned er blitt testet for antistoffer mot SARS-CoV-2, og det ble funnet ett positivt utslag i desember 2019, to i januar 2020, og ett i både februar og mars. Av de totalt 6520 kvinnene som ble undersøkt gjennom hele perioden, ble det påvist antistoffer hos 98 kvinner. Det må tas høyde for at en viss andel falske positive utslag kan oppstå, men forskerne konkluderer med at funnene tyder på at viruset sirkulerte i Norge allerede i 2019. So one sample from December 2019 and two from January 2020 tested positive, and they may be false positives.
lextuto 5y ago
The article mentions December 2019, I found another article [1] showing SARS-CoV-2 as early as September 2019 in Italy. From the article: "A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”. It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters." [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing-idUSKBN27W1J2 https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
- blywi 5y ago
  It looks like the proposed Covid-19 antibody find for Italy from 2019 is not uncontested among the science community, here is a comment from virologist Marion Koopmans [1], who was trying to validate the study's results: "Yrs, we tried. Sofar have not been able to confirm. Serology in low prevalence situations is challenging so our criteria are stringent ( triple antigen positive and neutralisation). With that no positives pre march 2020 in our country and sofar not in panel from italy" [1] https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/1416652642604945410 https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/141665264260494541...
unlikelymordant 5y ago
It seems to me that the death rate and transmissability of the wuhan strain of covid means it is unlikely it was around in other countries prior to its discovery in china, the deaths would have been noticed. Is it more likely that a less lethal strain was circulating, a few people developed antibodies, then it mutated in wuhan to become the more deadly version?. This would explain early antibodies, the lack of corresponding deaths in europe,but we also know how easy this thing mutates now.
- rguiscard 5y ago
  I agree with your argument. Wuhan strain may not be the first one which jumps from animals to human, but surely the first one to cause widely spread infection.
- native_samples 5y ago
  This is very difficult to say. In many countries COVID has not been a particularly deadly disease. Large numbers of recorded deaths "with COVID" obscure this but e.g. 2021 in the UK was about as deadly as 2015, 2020 was about as deadly as 2007 and in Sweden 2020 was about as deadly as 2012. So in all cases similar levels of death have been within the living memory of children. That is biased upwards and confounded by lockdown and healthcare-restriction deaths also, of course. ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities, so if China had never announced COVID, if mass testing had never started, if there'd been no panic, it's not totally clear to what extent it'd have surfaced into the public consciousness in Europe. It'd probably have been noticed by doctors and specialists. Now, in the USA things are worse. It's still not really explained why, but most likely due to obesity levels. Also USA stats are hard to work with because overall mortality had been going up for quite some time before COVID unlike in other places where it was slowly falling, so there are maybe deeper underlying problems there that this exposed. But let's put all that to one side. The question of how long SARS-CoV-2 has been around gets into the question of what a 'strain' is. This is a question of semantics and how virology classifies viruses. Unfortunately here things get very murky. There is a classification system for viruses that tries to decide if they are a 'variant' of SARS-CoV-2 called Pango. It takes as given that SARS-CoV-2 originates in Wuhan and all detected variants must be slottable into a family tree derived from two original sequences found there. There are some rules about how to do that but they are being frequently changed and this tree can, it seems, go on forever, as there's no rule that says "anything mutated more than X from the original Wuhan sequence is a different strain". All the rules are relative to entries already in the tree. So it's possible that according to virology there will never be a time when SARS-CoV-2 isn't endemic even if its behaviour and RNA changes totally. Additionally, COVID is defined as "presence of any variant classed by Pango as SARS-CoV-2". Thus the symptoms of COVID as a disease can also change totally without it ever being declared gone. Arguably this is already happening with Omicron. So ultimately the state of play in the public health/virology world is such that the papers claims can't really be evaluated precisely. For that you'd need a precise RNA-based definition of what SARS-CoV-2 actually is, and/or a precise clinical definition of what COVID is, but no such definitions exist.

31 points by tomashm 5y ago

There was another one in France a while back. I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all) But given that we only seen 2 samples among millions, could this simply be an error? Like test errors, mislabelled or the sample being infected at a later point?

martini333 5y ago
The Norwegian study found covid antigen in 98 out of 6520 samples.
- zibzab 5y ago
  Ah, you are correct. IIRC the French study was a single sample. On the other hand, I feel 98 indicates a wide spread in Norway and probably in whole Europe. But that doesn't match the picture we had in EU around January-February.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    This is an insane proportion and the virus would have been picked up much earlier in a place like Norway which does lots of testing and flu sampling.
- jsnell 5y ago
  Those 6250 samples were mostly from 2020, and the positive samples were almost entirely late 2020. Only one of the positives was from December 2019.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  98/6520 is about 1.5 percent. What is the false-positive rate for the antigen tests? Have the affected blood samples been verified by PCR testing?
  - martini333 5y ago
    No idea. But 98/6520 is more than 2 out of millions.
    - egberts1 5y ago
      and a lot closer to 1 out of 650.
  - rsfern 5y ago
    It’s most likely too late for PCR confirmation with these samples, there would need to be actual viral proteins in the blood sample, so an active or very recent infection at the time of the blood draw
- aaron695 5y ago
smt88 5y ago
I don't know why you think this means it didn't originate in Wuhan. It just means it was outside China earlier than we've thought. We already know the CCP suppressed research into the virus and blocked news of its spread early on. There's no reason to believe them when they tell us the date they discovered Covid.
netsharc 5y ago
These findings aren't smoking gun evidence that "Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all". The rumor of the "new pneumonia" was going around between doctors in Wuhan in November 2019 [1]. It's conceivable that there were people who travelled from Wuhan to Europe in November/December, and that the virus was actually in Europe before it was officially found. Of course it could've come via humans from somewhere else to Wuhan (a good scientist doesn't dismiss hypotheses), but for sure the first outbreak was there. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7378494/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7378494/
rich_sasha 5y ago
> I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all) I do wonder (honestly, not rhetorically), if the virus emerged somewhere outside of China, what are the odds of the first major outbreak being in Wuhan? Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time? Perhaps the presence of cases outside of China this early on simply means Covid was simmering, and spilling out, earlier than we thought.
- blagie 5y ago
  Well, a few explanations I can think of: 1) Covid19 was circulating, but had it's first outbreak in Wuhan due to things like population density 2) Covid19 was circulating earlier than China informed the world know (I'm not claiming grand conspiracy here to keep things secret; the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while) 3) There were other coronaviruses with the same or similar proteins elsewhere. I'm leaning towards #3. It makes a heck of a lot of sense for a lot of things unexplainable with SARS-COV2. If there was a mild cold circulating similar to SARS-COV2, but less deadly and less contagious, it'd explain a lot of the epidemiology (for example, why waves break so early, rather than infecting 70-90% of the population).
  - tremon 5y ago
    the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while It's even simpler than that: there was no need to figure anything out. If a few people present with flu-like symptoms but appear to suffer above average from it, Occam's conclusion would be that those people may have had an underlying condition that exacerbated the severity of their flu. There is zero need to go looking for zebra's until you identify a cluster of similar cases that all have above-average severity.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time? It's a difficult question to answer (and ask?), and we may never find the real answer. Coincidence, chance, luck? For now though, for all intents and purposes, Wuhan was ground zero and the first public cases in Italy and - I don't know, possibly these ones in Norway - can be traced back to Wuhan.

caaqil 5y ago

English version: https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/covid-19-was-discovered-in-blood-samples-stored-in-norway-as-early-as-2019-articleshow.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/covid-19-was...

estaseuropano 5y ago
Note this article is just a rehash of a Sputnik article. Sputnik is the prime example of a propaganda outlet and well known for pushing wrong, madr up or heavily biased and unreflective articles (also known as 'fake news' in the original sense of lies and deception, rather than the modern American 'things I don't like are fake news' sense). I have not read the original paper so cannot comment on substance, but don't believe a word of this.
- caaqil 5y ago
  I already read the submitted article using Google Translate, and the article I linked here basically contains the same information, just in English. You can confirm this by simply reading the original with the help of Google Translate.

makoto12 5y ago

My partner and myself got very sick on holiday in Germany, December 2019. Didn't think too much of it, until the symptoms of Covid started getting published and they all sounded eerily familiar. By the time antibody tests were available in my country it was too late. But no doubt in my mind it was covid. This just adds evidence to that fact

hgibbs 5y ago
But the symptoms of covid are very similar to e.g. the flu, and this would make you and your partner some of the first people on Europe to have had covid (given exponential increase in case counts it cannot have circulated for long before early 2020). My prior on anybody having covid in Europe in Dec 2019 is extremely low, I think yours should be too - just having been really sick is no evidence at all.
estaseuropano 5y ago
There are hundreds of similar diseases, in particular in the set of flu strains that are endemic. These can hit you hard with very similar symptoms.
- makoto12 5y ago
  maybe you're right. but loss of taste and smell. sick for 2 weeks and symptoms that persisted for 6+ months, obviously can't prove anything, but everything was suspiciously similar to covid. So it doesn't surprise me to see covid being found in dec 2019 samples in europe
  - pergadad 5y ago
    I cannot claim any special expertise on this but the CDC lists loss of taste and smell as a common symptom of flu and covid. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm
    - makoto12 5y ago

peterburkimsher 5y ago

Anecdata, not sure who to report this to for investigative purposes: 1. Teresa from Rako Science saliva testing station used to work as Air New Zealand cabin crew. With 5 other crew members, they went to Shanghai, and also stayed in the Grand Hyatt hotel opposite Taipei 101 in October 2019. They went to a nearby night market, presumably Taipei Hwahsi Tourist Night Market (which I went to on 2009-09-04, and had a lovely time). After that visit, they all had a respiratory infection similar to a bad flu, which didn't clear up after the doctor provided steroids and iron supplements, and they have had recurrences since then, roughly every 4 months. They're pretty sure in retrospect that they know what it was. To my knowledge, this is earlier than any confirmed WHO reports, at least as far as Wikipedia goes. 2. Mum reports that mum & dad's neighbours also report a bad flu in October/November 2019 in the Pays de Gex, near Geneva, Switzerland.

estaseuropano 5y ago
This is nonsense. There are plenty of diseases with similar symptoms. I will report your post as probable astroturfing, the weird detail without actual evidence or source and pointing to Taipei suggests makes evident your motives. There is no substance or value to this post, except to.spread unfounded and untraceable conspiracy theories.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Apparently you don't realize this, but peterburkimsher has some personal connections to Taiwan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400350 I'd like to say that jumping from a single post to conclusions about the posters motives makes something evident about you, but I don't feel like looking at your posting history to find out what it could be.
drran 5y ago
«bad flu» -> «swine flu»

K0nserv 5y ago

I'm not Norwegian(Swedish) and as far as I understand the article makes no mention of antigen tests. The article is talking about *antibodies* being found in blood tests from December 2019. I think the title should be changed, if someone who speaks Norwegian can weigh in that'd be helpful. This section is also interesting Det er også tidligere i pandemien påvist at koronaviruset sirkulerte i Italia i 2019, så tidlig som i september 2019, viser en italiensk studie fra Milano. Forskere har påpekt at viruset trolig også sirkulerte i kinesiske Wuhan lenge før det ble offisielt påvist. Hovedteorien er fortsatt at viruset først spredte seg der. Translated it says roughly: It has also been proven, earlier in the pandemic, that COVID19 was circulating in Italy in 2019, as early as September, according to an Italian study from Milano. Scientist have pointed out that the virus likely circulated in Wuhan a long time before it was officially detected[påvist, unsure if this is "proven"]. The leading theory remains that the virus originated there. See also, danielskogly's comment below.

Aldipower 5y ago
If this is correct, people having antibodies, then it would be even more interesting, imho.
danielskogly 5y ago
You're correct that the article doesn't mention antigen tests, ~~but the actual study[0] does~~: Edit: Apparantly the described test[1] is indeed for antibodies. See child comment by projektfu. > Summary: > We studied SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in Norway by including all women who were first trimester pregnant (n=6520), each month from December 2019 through December 2020, in the catchment region of Norway’s second largest hospital. We used sera that had been frozen stored after compulsory testing for syphilis antibodies in antenatal care. The sera were analyzed with the Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay (Roche Diagnostics, Cobas e801). This immunoassay detects IgG/IgM against SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/prevalence-of-antibodies-against-sarscov2-among-pregnant-women-in-norway-during-the-period-december-2019-through-december-2020/0178544CC4F04FC0A55C7B0BD5F28AB8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... [1] https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Blueprint/en/pdf/cps/Elecsys-Anti-SARS-CoV-2-S-factsheet-SEPT-2020-2.pdf https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Bluepr...

zosima 5y ago

This is not blood samples that are positive for antigen, but blood samples that contain covid-19 reactive antibodies. Now, cross-reactive antibodies is a thing, so I wouldn't pay a lot of attention to these number unless they can show that e.g. blood from 2017 had much less covid-19-reactive antibodies than the blood from 2019.

RamblingCTO 5y ago
This seems to be the only comment on this thread making sense.
jsnell 5y ago
Yeah, this is just crazy. They had blood samples going back five years, and did not run any earlier samples for calibration. But the paper claims the test has a specificity of 99.8% and the positive rate until March is 0.2% -- just the expected date of false positives.
native_samples 5y ago
Doesn't that requirement implicitly assume that SARS-CoV-2 prevalence grew linearly over time? What if 2017 had equal prevalence to 2019?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Of course not linear. The growth would be exponential. It is impossible for Covid to have existed in humans in 2017. You would need to explain how that exponential growth was invisible for years, and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019. 2017 and 2019 did indeed have the same prevalence in Europe: 0%.
  - drran 5y ago
    > and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019. September 16, 2019? It's easy: blast at BSL4 lab «Vector». «On September 16th, 2019, an explosion occurred at the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology building (Vector) in the city of Koltsovo, in the Novosiberisk region of Siberia, Russia (1). The affected building was a BSL 4 virology research centre, and one of only two known sites housing variola virus, the cause of smallpox. The facility has one of the largest collections of dangerous pathogens in the world. Whilst laboratory safety breaches are common and do not usually result in epidemics, explosions are rare. Unlike a needlestick injury or an accidental shipping of live anthrax, an explosion of this magnitude is likely to lead to a physical breach of the integrity of the laboratory, possibly affecting multiple parts of the structure and equipment within. An explosion is sudden, uncontrolled and unpredictable, and involves force which may result in pathogen release into the surrounding environment. An epidemic which arises in close proximity to the explosion could spread beyond the affected region or even globally, which makes this event a concern for global public health.» https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/

danielskogly 5y ago

Actual study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/prevalence-of-antibodies-against-sarscov2-among-pregnant-women-in-norway-during-the-period-december-2019-through-december-2020/0178544CC4F04FC0A55C7B0BD5F28AB8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf... Original press release: https://www.ahus.no/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norge-allerede-i-2019 https://www.ahus.no/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norg... Google translated version: https://www-ahus-no.translate.goog/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norge-allerede-i-2019?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-ahus-no.translate.goog/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan...

T-A 5y ago
Thanks. From the press release: Rundt 500 prøver per måned er blitt testet for antistoffer mot SARS-CoV-2, og det ble funnet ett positivt utslag i desember 2019, to i januar 2020, og ett i både februar og mars. Av de totalt 6520 kvinnene som ble undersøkt gjennom hele perioden, ble det påvist antistoffer hos 98 kvinner. Det må tas høyde for at en viss andel falske positive utslag kan oppstå, men forskerne konkluderer med at funnene tyder på at viruset sirkulerte i Norge allerede i 2019. So one sample from December 2019 and two from January 2020 tested positive, and they may be false positives.

lextuto 5y ago

The article mentions December 2019, I found another article [1] showing SARS-CoV-2 as early as September 2019 in Italy. From the article: "A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”. It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters." [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing-idUSKBN27W1J2 https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

blywi 5y ago
It looks like the proposed Covid-19 antibody find for Italy from 2019 is not uncontested among the science community, here is a comment from virologist Marion Koopmans [1], who was trying to validate the study's results: "Yrs, we tried. Sofar have not been able to confirm. Serology in low prevalence situations is challenging so our criteria are stringent ( triple antigen positive and neutralisation). With that no positives pre march 2020 in our country and sofar not in panel from italy" [1] https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/1416652642604945410 https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/141665264260494541...

unlikelymordant 5y ago

It seems to me that the death rate and transmissability of the wuhan strain of covid means it is unlikely it was around in other countries prior to its discovery in china, the deaths would have been noticed. Is it more likely that a less lethal strain was circulating, a few people developed antibodies, then it mutated in wuhan to become the more deadly version?. This would explain early antibodies, the lack of corresponding deaths in europe,but we also know how easy this thing mutates now.

rguiscard 5y ago
I agree with your argument. Wuhan strain may not be the first one which jumps from animals to human, but surely the first one to cause widely spread infection.
native_samples 5y ago
This is very difficult to say. In many countries COVID has not been a particularly deadly disease. Large numbers of recorded deaths "with COVID" obscure this but e.g. 2021 in the UK was about as deadly as 2015, 2020 was about as deadly as 2007 and in Sweden 2020 was about as deadly as 2012. So in all cases similar levels of death have been within the living memory of children. That is biased upwards and confounded by lockdown and healthcare-restriction deaths also, of course. ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities, so if China had never announced COVID, if mass testing had never started, if there'd been no panic, it's not totally clear to what extent it'd have surfaced into the public consciousness in Europe. It'd probably have been noticed by doctors and specialists. Now, in the USA things are worse. It's still not really explained why, but most likely due to obesity levels. Also USA stats are hard to work with because overall mortality had been going up for quite some time before COVID unlike in other places where it was slowly falling, so there are maybe deeper underlying problems there that this exposed. But let's put all that to one side. The question of how long SARS-CoV-2 has been around gets into the question of what a 'strain' is. This is a question of semantics and how virology classifies viruses. Unfortunately here things get very murky. There is a classification system for viruses that tries to decide if they are a 'variant' of SARS-CoV-2 called Pango. It takes as given that SARS-CoV-2 originates in Wuhan and all detected variants must be slottable into a family tree derived from two original sequences found there. There are some rules about how to do that but they are being frequently changed and this tree can, it seems, go on forever, as there's no rule that says "anything mutated more than X from the original Wuhan sequence is a different strain". All the rules are relative to entries already in the tree. So it's possible that according to virology there will never be a time when SARS-CoV-2 isn't endemic even if its behaviour and RNA changes totally. Additionally, COVID is defined as "presence of any variant classed by Pango as SARS-CoV-2". Thus the symptoms of COVID as a disease can also change totally without it ever being declared gone. Arguably this is already happening with Omicron. So ultimately the state of play in the public health/virology world is such that the papers claims can't really be evaluated precisely. For that you'd need a precise RNA-based definition of what SARS-CoV-2 actually is, and/or a precise clinical definition of what COVID is, but no such definitions exist.