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Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't

Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance. It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.

swang 3y ago
a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days. i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ipqk 3y ago
  I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      A common cold that turns into bronchial pneumonia can be substantially worse than SARS-CoV-2 in any given person. That doesn't make the common cold worse than SARS-CoV-2 on average.
      - taeric 3y ago
        Honestly, odds are high I did have an early covid case. Was like an asthma attack with a few nights of fever. And I had every symptom. (Though, my understanding is loss of smell came and went as symptoms? I can't remember what the final call on that was.) I never got a confirmed test, as they weren't testing then. Mostly irrelevant, as I don't think it would change anything else. Keep your distance and try not to get people sick is still good advice. I just offer it as understanding that there is a lot to be confused about on this. Kind of like early claims that kids couldn't get it. Which is asinine on evidence of everything kids spread through the family.
        lamontcg 3y ago
        My understanding is that the loss of smell from early COVID tends to be fairly profound. It makes food disgusting. You can burn food on the stove and not smell it even after the fire alarm goes off. And it recovers slowly. It isn't like the usual changes in taste/smell during an infection which are mostly due to the symptoms of rhinitis and clear up when they clear up.
        taeric 3y ago
        Yeah, that was my understanding, and is what I had. Was odd to find I could breath just fine, but couldn't smell coffee. Had a similar thing happen a year ago, where I couldn't even smell menthol rub. Could breath, just couldn't smell. That time, though, I was testing and never got a positive test. I thought, at the time, the general idea was that loss of smell wasn't a thing, anymore. Maybe not?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips through there and kills about a third of them. The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA. The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible to think that it was floating around CES 2020. The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long, although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and then it quickly becomes very, very fast. It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very difficult to detect and the first several hundred people mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and then it can't be ignored. If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself. You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.
  - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
    > then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Yeah, but the actual number of COVID dead has been a widely disputed topic and it's well established that excess deaths significantly increased during the pandemic, which indicates that a lot more people died overall that didn't go down as formal COVID cases[0]. It's very likely that early COVID deaths were not properly counted because we weren't in formal pandemic protocols yet. Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available. I don't think it's a stretch at all to think that it had widespread reach early in 2020 when the research indicates that the actual number of COVID dead in 2020 is more than double what was officially reported. From the piece I've linked below: > On 30 January 2020 COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with an official death toll of 171. By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1 813 188. Yet preliminary estimates suggest the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million, representing 1.2 million more deaths than officially reported. 0: https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covi...
- karmicthreat 3y ago
  There was a really bad flu that went around just before Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.
  - tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.
dumbfounder 3y ago
Proof is not objective. There are levels of proof, different ones for civil and criminal in the US. So, maybe this doesn't prove it to you, but it will prove it to others. Argue for what level of proof you think is right here, but there is no absolute in proof for anything like this, ever.
- mullingitover 3y ago
  You're not wrong. My take is this: the context of this debate is, for many, "China caused the Covid pandemic intentionally and conspired to hide their culpability." It's a big claim, literally a conspiracy theory, so I'd put it at the standards of a criminal trial. This is circumstantial evidence and, while it's certainly evidence that could be used to prosecute that claim, it isn't a case of China being caught in flagrante delicto. In particular, the screaming headline "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV" is very weak. There are reports from someone that people at WIV were sick. Nothing firmly supporting that it was Covid, and nothing but anonymously-sourced evidence that people at WIV were even sick.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    Nobody is saying that China caused the pandemic intentionally.
    - mullingitover 3y ago
      You'd think nobody would be enough of a wacko to say this. You'd be wrong, there was at least one wacko saying it.[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/18/trump-suggests-china-may-have-intentionally-allowed-coronavirus-to-spread/?sh=27125f233f1c https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/18/trump-su...
      - memefrog 3y ago
        He said they may have done so and that there's a chance it was intentional, which is entirely true and quite a reasonable thing to say. He acknowledges that it's unlikely, and he doesn't think that they would do that or that they did. But it is absolutely possible. You'd have to be crazy to think it wasn't possible. The same article says: > As the pandemic began spreading in earnest in the United States, President Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration began to circulate a controversial theory that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though there is no evidence supporting this claim either. ...which is a lie. There was evidence supporting that claim even back in June 2020. The mere fact of the lab's existence in the city at the time and the subject matter that it was studying is evidence. It is not enough evidence of its own, but it is (circumstantial) evidence. People get convicted of crimes based on circumstantial evidence every day, and rightly so.
dools 3y ago
Yeah it seems that they could have been sick with anything. They could even have been sick because of what they were working on. There's no mention of how often people get sick in the lab. Like maybe people were sick in September and May and February with "covid like symptoms" because they do research on covid-like viruses. It's a pretty specious line of reasoning to say that the fact some people were sick with "covid like symtpoms" (which are basically "flu like symptoms" for many) points to them being "patients zero". Also the State Department release they link to is complaining about China's secrecy but leads by saying they don't know.
nathansherburn 3y ago
Totally agree. It's kind of annoying that we don't even have a system like this for the researchers at the labs!

swang 3y ago

a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days. i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ipqk 3y ago
I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.
- taeric 3y ago
  Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    A common cold that turns into bronchial pneumonia can be substantially worse than SARS-CoV-2 in any given person. That doesn't make the common cold worse than SARS-CoV-2 on average.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Honestly, odds are high I did have an early covid case. Was like an asthma attack with a few nights of fever. And I had every symptom. (Though, my understanding is loss of smell came and went as symptoms? I can't remember what the final call on that was.) I never got a confirmed test, as they weren't testing then. Mostly irrelevant, as I don't think it would change anything else. Keep your distance and try not to get people sick is still good advice. I just offer it as understanding that there is a lot to be confused about on this. Kind of like early claims that kids couldn't get it. Which is asinine on evidence of everything kids spread through the family.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        My understanding is that the loss of smell from early COVID tends to be fairly profound. It makes food disgusting. You can burn food on the stove and not smell it even after the fire alarm goes off. And it recovers slowly. It isn't like the usual changes in taste/smell during an infection which are mostly due to the symptoms of rhinitis and clear up when they clear up.
        taeric 3y ago
        Yeah, that was my understanding, and is what I had. Was odd to find I could breath just fine, but couldn't smell coffee. Had a similar thing happen a year ago, where I couldn't even smell menthol rub. Could breath, just couldn't smell. That time, though, I was testing and never got a positive test. I thought, at the time, the general idea was that loss of smell wasn't a thing, anymore. Maybe not?
lamontcg 3y ago
If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips through there and kills about a third of them. The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA. The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible to think that it was floating around CES 2020. The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long, although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and then it quickly becomes very, very fast. It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very difficult to detect and the first several hundred people mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and then it can't be ignored. If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself. You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  > then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Yeah, but the actual number of COVID dead has been a widely disputed topic and it's well established that excess deaths significantly increased during the pandemic, which indicates that a lot more people died overall that didn't go down as formal COVID cases[0]. It's very likely that early COVID deaths were not properly counted because we weren't in formal pandemic protocols yet. Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available. I don't think it's a stretch at all to think that it had widespread reach early in 2020 when the research indicates that the actual number of COVID dead in 2020 is more than double what was officially reported. From the piece I've linked below: > On 30 January 2020 COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with an official death toll of 171. By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1 813 188. Yet preliminary estimates suggest the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million, representing 1.2 million more deaths than officially reported. 0: https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covi...
karmicthreat 3y ago
There was a really bad flu that went around just before Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.

dumbfounder 3y ago

Proof is not objective. There are levels of proof, different ones for civil and criminal in the US. So, maybe this doesn't prove it to you, but it will prove it to others. Argue for what level of proof you think is right here, but there is no absolute in proof for anything like this, ever.

mullingitover 3y ago
You're not wrong. My take is this: the context of this debate is, for many, "China caused the Covid pandemic intentionally and conspired to hide their culpability." It's a big claim, literally a conspiracy theory, so I'd put it at the standards of a criminal trial. This is circumstantial evidence and, while it's certainly evidence that could be used to prosecute that claim, it isn't a case of China being caught in flagrante delicto. In particular, the screaming headline "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV" is very weak. There are reports from someone that people at WIV were sick. Nothing firmly supporting that it was Covid, and nothing but anonymously-sourced evidence that people at WIV were even sick.
- memefrog 3y ago
  Nobody is saying that China caused the pandemic intentionally.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    You'd think nobody would be enough of a wacko to say this. You'd be wrong, there was at least one wacko saying it.[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/18/trump-suggests-china-may-have-intentionally-allowed-coronavirus-to-spread/?sh=27125f233f1c https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/06/18/trump-su...
    - memefrog 3y ago
      He said they may have done so and that there's a chance it was intentional, which is entirely true and quite a reasonable thing to say. He acknowledges that it's unlikely, and he doesn't think that they would do that or that they did. But it is absolutely possible. You'd have to be crazy to think it wasn't possible. The same article says: > As the pandemic began spreading in earnest in the United States, President Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration began to circulate a controversial theory that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though there is no evidence supporting this claim either. ...which is a lie. There was evidence supporting that claim even back in June 2020. The mere fact of the lab's existence in the city at the time and the subject matter that it was studying is evidence. It is not enough evidence of its own, but it is (circumstantial) evidence. People get convicted of crimes based on circumstantial evidence every day, and rightly so.

dools 3y ago

Yeah it seems that they could have been sick with anything. They could even have been sick because of what they were working on. There's no mention of how often people get sick in the lab. Like maybe people were sick in September and May and February with "covid like symptoms" because they do research on covid-like viruses. It's a pretty specious line of reasoning to say that the fact some people were sick with "covid like symtpoms" (which are basically "flu like symptoms" for many) points to them being "patients zero". Also the State Department release they link to is complaining about China's secrecy but leads by saying they don't know.

nathansherburn 3y ago

Totally agree. It's kind of annoying that we don't even have a system like this for the researchers at the labs!