3 ms·

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 unli

by 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.

by jsnell 3y ago

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.