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.
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.
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.
"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.
I got the sickest I have been in years in December 2019. I had a cough for about 6 months afterwards that was sufficiently bad that I had a chest x-ray to rule out lung cancer. My partner got sick shortly after I did with similar symptoms.
I suspect it was the flu though. My desk neighbour at work was hospitalised for the flu (tested and confirmed) a week earlier. I had been vaccinated, but it's mayve the case I had a more mild case than he did thanks to the vaccination.
That being said, my partner is a nurse and was the only person in her department not to get covid. WE did get tested for covid antibodies in late 2020 and didn't have any, but it's possible they had diminished by then if it really was covid.
But the simplest explanation is still that it was just the flu.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I think you can take an antibody test, if you had Covid (and assuming you didn't get the Covid vaccine or real Covid later), you should show signs of antibodies.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
First, there's no scientific basis for doing so. Unless your diet is deficient of zinc or you're spending months in an overcast winter environment neither is going to do anything for you. They certainly won't have any impact on antibody formation.
I’m actually surprised that I don’t hear more “I thought I had COVID in 2019, took an antibody test, and was right” anecdotes. Especially if the false positive rate on these tests is significant.
The antibody tests do occasionally come up negative for patients who had confirmed infections. You might want to get the Adaptive Biotechnologies T-Detect COVID test which assays memory T cells.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
Myself and a few friends all got really sick in late february, early March - in my case it was when they were only giving covid tests to people who were hospitalized, so there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait.
We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative.
So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.
There are plentiful anecdotes (including this very comment section) of people with similar stories just assuming they had caught covid early. Yours is the only one I've seen where the people involved took a rational/science minded approach and bothered to get tested for antibodies. Your story should be viewed as a teaching moment about making assumptions for others.
>So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug?
I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.
> I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone.
This is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about influenza statistics, btw. That "tens of thousands" number is an estimate; confirmed annual influenza deaths are much lower, from 3,448 to 15,620 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...).
This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a bus.
Its interesting to me how so many people got a flu during flu season but they all are convinced they had covid. Good for you for at least getting an antibody test.
It's also interesting that this year the flu has disappeared ( zero if I heard it right)in some places) because according to the medical lords the mask wearing has had an effect. It's all a modern day version of religion.
I had a coworker who got really sick around the same time. He had the PCR test done and it came back negative. There was definitely a bad flu going around at the same time as covid was popping up in the US.
Same happened to me, was in public a lot that February, got a terrible flu that laid me up. Got tested twice (two different antibodies tests) a few months later and both negative.
Just a bad coincidence but I suppose I could count myself lucky.
I could see that. I got absolutely wrecked around the end of February, in part because I got badly chilled one night and allowed it to persist (not wanting to go make a fire in the woodstove when it was already nighttime). I ran a high fever for days and was totally wiped out, and have always wondered if it was COVID.
Ended up just getting vaccinated, now I'll never know. For what it's worth, the second Moderna dose clobbered me like it was supposed to, so maybe it was busy making antibodies and I didn't actually get any immunity from February 2020…
This was my experience as well. In SF and got symptoms mid Feb, doctor visit two weeks later concluded pneumonia and gave me antibiotics, no covid tests available, took 2+ months to recover. Later got Abbott Architect antibody test and it was negative, but I'm skeptical of the result.
If you're reading this article and live in the US, you should really consider enrolling in the All of Us research study:
https://www.joinallofus.org
It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many many others :)
From the linked article: "Of the 24,079 study participants with blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi."
So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or had the virus at that point.
That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been spreading for a while.)
Yeah, this is selecting for people participating in a medical study, it is far from a random sampling.
Lots of very rural America would be ruled out, even if the study participants weren't all from traditional big cities.
People that are less mobile also wouldn't participate, etc. Lots of people who wouldn't contract COVID early would also not be likely to participate in this kind of trial.
Plus the positives in this case weren't all in January, they spread into March (by which point in time finding positives becomes much more likely).
And that's aside from the difficulties with antibody testing and cross-reactivity -- although this study looks a lot better than the previous one.
I don't think the phrase you quote is intended as a dismissal of the data. It comes across as an acknowledgement of the data's limitations, and a caution about what kind of conclusions can be drawn. During my statistics course in college, one of the first sections of the course covered sampling, and the various ways sampling can be done badly, thereby biasing the sample, and thereby leading to conclusions about the sampled population that don't reflect the reality of that population.
Cautioning against that failure mode strikes me as intellectually honest, not anti-science.
I think they are implying that blood sampling is not a random sample of people (more likely to be from someone who is sick), not that it is inaccurate.
I have been curious. Back in December 2019, myself, my dad, my boss and some other friends and family all got sick. It lasted about 3-4 weeks. It was a weird cold. None of us really got that sick, but we all felt terrible, weak and lethargic, aches and pains, slightly feverish some days then not other days, a really bad sore throat to the point where swallowing hurt and not really a cough, but badly congested lungs. Breathing was hard and it was hard to clear the congestion.
It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time.
It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again.
We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.
The chances are really low that it was covid. A lot of colds go around and many last a long time. Millions of Americans had a cold in December 2019. A handful likely had COVID-19. You are probably in the former camp.
I agree, that's why I've never really considered it was covid. It was just coincidental timing and strange symptoms. It wouldn't be my first 'weird cold'. I haven't even really thought about it much until I seen the comment thread here. Seeing other people's stories reminded me of it. It was just more of an anecdote to add than anything.
I had almost the exact same experience in late Jan [edit: 2020], along with most of my coworkers. I did keep wondering if I had Covid so I got tested, but with a negative result. The main piece of evidence that speaks against the Covid theory is any kind of mortality deviation, which didn't occur until later half of March.
Anecdotally, over time I heard many other locales, workspaces and schools experienced a similar "weird cold." It may not have been Covid but there was certainly a very widespread, and very unusual cold in the winter of 2019-2020.
says "The unusually abrupt decline in cases by April 2020 was attributed to the effects of widespread social distancing and lockdowns aimed at COVID-19"
Is there any possibility that the cases are counted in COVID-19 after April 2020 ?
I've heard stories like this from a lot of people in Dec/Jan/Feb. Many of them carried on in the months that followed as if they were already in possession of antibodies, believing that they "already had covid".
As others have pointed out, there are lots of cold-and-flu style illnesses endemic in the human population. There are antibody tests that can tell you reasonably authoritatively, if you're actually curious.
Some of the schools around me closed for a day in late January 2020 to clean due to an influenza outbreak. I thought it was strange at the time since there was no evident increase in illness among adults I know. I figure it was a bad strain that had been lying dormant for a while, so kids had no immunity to it. It was very specifically stated at the time to be influenza, as opposed to just higher-than-normal absences due to non-specific diseases. I think the absence rate was something like 30%.
I never did, i don't think any of us did. One of us ended up in close proximity however to someone who'd tested positive for covid, just prior to getting the results of their tests. This person did not get sick.
That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing should be made of it unless that person were to ever be tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still can't draw any conclusions from it.
Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020, just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not because I thought I already had it, but mostly because there's no point in worrying about something I can't change. If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened.
I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having been following the rules fairly stringently would unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where I could be exposed for no real reason.
I think this is a good argument for the government to start a program to do an ongoing “serological census”.
On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If there’s ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of, this would give us the data before we’re even aware of its existence.
Here's a simple one: do we really trust a government agency (or hell, anyone really) to collect intimate and identifiable data about our bodies all while preserving anonymity and securing the data from nation state attackers? Do we trust nameless data scientists to run SQL queries over us that aren't intended to determine which ones of us will be smarter, stronger, more violent, etc? Do we trust politicians that have not yet been elected to office to use this data for benevolent purposes like our current politicians would (if we trust our current politicians)?
Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester inside of concerned populations and spread to non-controversial parts of the government such as the post office and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a good chunk of Jews.
How do you develop a storage buffer for things you haven't even encountered? Also, freezing and thawing is an imperfect process that can damage cells. Sure we might luck out too..
But yeah, like the other poster said, the bill-gates-corona-5G-mind-control-implant folks are going to have a field day with that :D
The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low. Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the population every month to catch a rare event like that.
re:Black, Latino/Hispanic, White. Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race. I had to ask if I was Hispanic. I speak Spanish, live in Spain but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans. N. B. there is no reason for them to even ask if you are or are not.
And no, I could not chose to be Hispanic: its a term assigned to you. Some Spanish nationals are Hispanic some are not. Some Mexicans are not Hispanic. It does not matter where you were born or the colour of your skin. Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for "lying" on the visa form.
That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.
> Only in the US is speaking Spanish considered a race.
No, its not.
Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnic category independent of race.
And it doesn’t mean “speaking Spanish”, it means: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” [0]
> but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans.
Told by whom? Obviously this is deeply false. It also contradicts your later claim that:
> Some Mexicans are not Hispanic.
So, I'm not clear what your story is, is it that it is just an "official racist" code for "Mexican" or is it …something else?
> Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for “lying” on the visa form.
Neither the immigrant nor non-immigrant visa application form asks for ethnicity in general or Hispanic origin in particular. [1][2]
Latino/Hispanic is not considered a race by the US government, it's an ethnic group. Latino covers all people of Latin descent including native Spaniards and Portuguese.
I, too, had a very bad cold in December 2019 and January 2020. With a lot of exhausting dry cough and no unusual bacteria cultivated from samples. Five weeks of utter misery.
But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe back then must have been something else.
Readit News
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.
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.
His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.
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.
I suspect it was the flu though. My desk neighbour at work was hospitalised for the flu (tested and confirmed) a week earlier. I had been vaccinated, but it's mayve the case I had a more mild case than he did thanks to the vaccination.
That being said, my partner is a nurse and was the only person in her department not to get covid. WE did get tested for covid antibodies in late 2020 and didn't have any, but it's possible they had diminished by then if it really was covid.
But the simplest explanation is still that it was just the flu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First, there's no scientific basis for doing so. Unless your diet is deficient of zinc or you're spending months in an overcast winter environment neither is going to do anything for you. They certainly won't have any impact on antibody formation.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
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.
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
Or, you know, the most obvious thing. You had the flu, during flu season.
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.
>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.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi...
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.
We all assumed it was covid, but once antibody tests became widely available, we all went and got them - and none of us had antibodies. I actually got like three different antibody tests over the span of two months because I couldn't believe I hadn't had covid. All negative.
So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug? It was pretty upsetting, tbh, that we all were like, "Well, that stunk, but at least we know we're immune now", only to discover that no indeed we were not.
>So maybe we just all caught a bad flu bug?
I think we in the general public have a tendency to underestimate just how bad the flu is. Tens of thousands of people die from it every year in the US alone. This in spite of easy access to vaccines. It's nothing to mess around with.
This is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about influenza statistics, btw. That "tens of thousands" number is an estimate; confirmed annual influenza deaths are much lower, from 3,448 to 15,620 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...).
Holy hell this.
I wanted to punch people who were saying "Covid is just like a bad flu."
I've had bad flus. "I would kill myself but I can't get out of bed to do it" is something that goes through your mind.
Anyone who dismisses something as "just a bad flu" should get infected with flu for the next 10 flu seasons. That would teach them.
Just a bad coincidence but I suppose I could count myself lucky.
Ended up just getting vaccinated, now I'll never know. For what it's worth, the second Moderna dose clobbered me like it was supposed to, so maybe it was busy making antibodies and I didn't actually get any immunity from February 2020…
It's planned to be a 10 year longitudinal cohort study, where they're regularly collecting samples and measurements to be used to try to advance things like precision medicine. Your contribution can help continue doing studies like this and many many others :)
So 9 out of 24,079. Assuming the blood sampling is representative (which it is likely not) and just multiplying up to all 330 mio Americans. It would mean that 123,000 Americans would have had or had the virus at that point.
That sounds like a lot. (And it also sounds it would have been spreading for a while.)
That assumption is, uhm, doing a lot of work there
Lots of very rural America would be ruled out, even if the study participants weren't all from traditional big cities.
People that are less mobile also wouldn't participate, etc. Lots of people who wouldn't contract COVID early would also not be likely to participate in this kind of trial.
Plus the positives in this case weren't all in January, they spread into March (by which point in time finding positives becomes much more likely).
And that's aside from the difficulties with antibody testing and cross-reactivity -- although this study looks a lot better than the previous one.
I can't think of anything more anti-science than dismissing data.
Cautioning against that failure mode strikes me as intellectually honest, not anti-science.
It was the length of time that was the most strange and all of us were sick for pretty much the same length of time.
It wasn't the flu, if i get sick that long with the flu, I get fucked up, and colds never last that long for me. This was just like a month of general shittyness. Even then it took probably until around the end of January before I felt 'normal.' again.
We've all sort of speculated half seriously that maybe we had covid, but never really took it seriously.
It was too early for C19, but it was brutal nonetheless.
Anecdotally, over time I heard many other locales, workspaces and schools experienced a similar "weird cold." It may not have been Covid but there was certainly a very widespread, and very unusual cold in the winter of 2019-2020.
says "The unusually abrupt decline in cases by April 2020 was attributed to the effects of widespread social distancing and lockdowns aimed at COVID-19"
Is there any possibility that the cases are counted in COVID-19 after April 2020 ?
As others have pointed out, there are lots of cold-and-flu style illnesses endemic in the human population. There are antibody tests that can tell you reasonably authoritatively, if you're actually curious.
That may or may not mean something or nothing, it's impossible to say. It's just an observation and nothing should be made of it unless that person were to ever be tested properly for anti-bodies and even then, you still can't draw any conclusions from it.
Myself at least, I never got sick through the rest of 2020, just followed the rules and such and didn't worry much, not because I thought I already had it, but mostly because there's no point in worrying about something I can't change. If I ended up with it after still doing the best I could to avoid situations that bring me into contact with it, then there's not much I can do except deal with it if it happened.
I figured being tested when not showing symptoms and having been following the rules fairly stringently would unnecessarily put myself in a situation and environment where I could be exposed for no real reason.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25066791...
On an ongoing basis, take random samples from the population and freeze their nasal swabs, blood samples, skin shavings, etc. If there’s ever a major disease we need to understand the spread of, this would give us the data before we’re even aware of its existence.
Maybe there is some benefit to running such a program, but it would be outweighed by the vulgar distrust that would fester inside of concerned populations and spread to non-controversial parts of the government such as the post office and the voting process. Concerned populations here are not just conspiracy nuts; it would include undocumented immigrants, Black and Hispanic minorities, and probably a good chunk of Jews.
But yeah, like the other poster said, the bill-gates-corona-5G-mind-control-implant folks are going to have a field day with that :D
Some details of the positive test collection dates by state:
5 were Black, 2 were Latino/Hispanic, 2 were WhitePage 20 shows that there was a lot of unbalance for the states with samples. Texas for example only had 84 samples processed, but Illinois had 2,426.
That is institutional racism taken to the doublethink level.
No, its not.
Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnic category independent of race.
And it doesn’t mean “speaking Spanish”, it means: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” [0]
> but I was told told its just the official racist term for Mexicans.
Told by whom? Obviously this is deeply false. It also contradicts your later claim that:
> Some Mexicans are not Hispanic.
So, I'm not clear what your story is, is it that it is just an "official racist" code for "Mexican" or is it …something else?
> Its _official_ racism, they decide if you are or are not Hispanic and if they decide you are and you thought you were not, or vice versa, you can be banned from entry into the US forever for “lying” on the visa form.
Neither the immigrant nor non-immigrant visa application form asks for ethnicity in general or Hispanic origin in particular. [1][2]
[0] See, e.g., the Census page on it, even though the policy is government-wide where race/ethnic data is collected, under OMB directive: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/abo...
[1] nonimmigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/PDF-other/DS-160-...
[2] immigrant: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/DS-260-Exemplar.p...
I always thought that you’re legally able to self-identify however you deem accurate on those government forms in the U.S?
But I had regular Covid-19 a year later and the disease felt completely different. Whatever was running around Central Europe back then must have been something else.