3 ms·

There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020

There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred. It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.

hammock 3y ago
The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation circa September 2019. [0] Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1] Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2] I’m sure that’s all just coincidence. [0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135007775.html https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135... [1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci... [2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-20804.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
- jvm___ 3y ago
  So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread globally almost immediately.
baja_blast 3y ago
I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
- sp0rk 3y ago
  > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population. If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated. Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
ren_engineer 3y ago
I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-explainer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  there was a new chemical introduced into the black market supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury
- Symmetry 3y ago
  That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nso 3y ago
I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out. Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
- duderific 3y ago
  I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way. I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
  - nso 3y ago
    Well to be fair it wasn't known at the time
midnightauro 3y ago
I suddenly developed “exercise asthma” in March 2020 and was told it was too early to have been COVID. But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work. I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point. But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.
jsnell 3y ago
That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month. If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early. All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
- jleyank 3y ago
  There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics. Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
  - jsnell 3y ago
    I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't. Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy. It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.

hammock 3y ago

The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

zmgsabst 3y ago
WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation circa September 2019. [0] Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1] Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2] I’m sure that’s all just coincidence. [0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135007775.html https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135... [1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci... [2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-20804.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...
- Izkata 3y ago
  > Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
jvm___ 3y ago
So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread globally almost immediately.

baja_blast 3y ago

I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.

sp0rk 3y ago
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population. If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
Izkata 3y ago
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated. Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.

ren_engineer 3y ago

I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-explainer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...

whimsicalism 3y ago
there was a new chemical introduced into the black market supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury
Symmetry 3y ago
That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nso 3y ago

I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out. Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
duderific 3y ago
I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way. I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
- nso 3y ago
  Well to be fair it wasn't known at the time

midnightauro 3y ago

I suddenly developed “exercise asthma” in March 2020 and was told it was too early to have been COVID. But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work. I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point. But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.

jsnell 3y ago

That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month. If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early. All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).

jleyank 3y ago
There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics. Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/2020/study-suggests-possible-new-covid-19-timeline-in-the-us.html https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0300891620974755 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
- jsnell 3y ago
  I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't. Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy. It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.