[chandraonline]

Anecdata but I also saw a bunch of adults with school going children becoming sick with flu like symptoms in December & January and recovering, incidentally the kids were either mildly sick or totally fine. In hindsight I also drew the same conclusion. Perhaps covid-19 was making the rounds in the US even before we officially declared it was here.

[CydeWeys]

There's lots of other viruses making the rounds in winter. This timeline doesn't add up; December is way too early for COVID-19 anywhere except Wuhan. It was something else.

[HelloNurse]

It's hard to tell without testing patients, of course. But with unrestricted intercontinental flights spreading diseases requires bad luck, not time: in December (or earlier) the streets of Wuhan and any city in the world were only one cough in the street apart.

[foota]

It's still doubtful though, since there was a small number of people infected, the odds of them in particular traveling while contagious are low, especially when you consider that the first people infected may have limited travel because of demographics.

[CydeWeys]

There's at least a 99.99% certainty here it wasn't COVID-19, likely a lot more nines. It just doesn't add up.

[hcknwscommenter]

For December time frame, this is the correct interpretation. We would already see a suspicious spike in 1st-2nd week Jan pneumonia death rates if COVID-19 were spreading in the US in December. Average time to death for those who do die is I believe 17 days from onset of symptoms.

[CydeWeys]

Yeah, there's just no way there was a huge COVID-19 cluster here in the US in December, and then everyone just got better and it never turned identifiable. We know how insanely contagious this disease is. It couldn't have been circulating for months in a given area without sending enough people to the hospital/morgue to draw scrutiny.

[paulmd]

> Perhaps covid-19 was making the rounds in the US even before we officially declared it was here.

Yes, highly possible, one reearcher believes it was circulating in Washington state since at least middle of January. The term of art is "cryptic transmission".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-may-have-s...

Part of the problem is that the CDC's definitions were so strict at the time that you could not be tested unless you had personally traveled to China, so all cases of domestic transmission were being discounted at that time.

[dmix]

> Part of the problem is that the CDC's definitions were so strict at the time

Do you think this problem will be rectified in future epidemics? Or is this just the nature of testing and/or the healthcare bureaucracy at the national/international level?

The amount of times the article mentions Biogen employees getting denied testing, days before the rest of the company would find out they had reached 70, really bothers me.

[paulmd]

> Do you think this problem will be rectified in future epidemics? Or is this just the nature of testing and/or the healthcare bureaucracy at the national/international level?

I think this is such a broad question with so many factors it's not really possible to answer.

I think the fact that it was a flu-like disease contributed to an overall lax attitude towards this. If it had been Ebola, health authorities would have clamped down hard and fast.

I think the fact that it started in China was a contributing factor. China didn't want to look like a source of disease, China didn't want its reputation on the international stage damaged by criticism from CDC and WHO and so those authorities were possibly more mute than normal. And there is another potential dimension here if this ends up being a military weapon that accidentally escaped from Wuhan BSL-4 containment. That may be a reason they came down on those researchers who sounded the alarm - those researchers worked at that BSL-4 facility and may have been discussing something that was classified and the chinese government didn't want discussed. This also may have been one dimension behind the Trump administration classifying the early briefings (although more generally I think they just didn't want to spook the market).

Finally, it's also impossible to separate the response from the administration. The Trump administration cut the budget for the epidemic response teams that would have been our first defense against this, two years ago. And their overall administration has been petty at best and malicious at worst. Just like how he went after the NWS officials who corrected his (completely wrong) forecast predictions for the hurricane landfall, there has been a reluctance to countermand him or correct him even when he's doing something completely wrong lest he come back at CDC or WHO and further sabotage the response in revenge. He spent the first two months of this year arguing that it was a hoax being cooked up by the deep state CDC to damage the economy and hurt his re-election chances. Even the Bush administration would have been far more competent at responding to this, Trump's leadership is exceptionally bad. You can say that's tribalism but the reason people are so all-in on that is because it's true, the Trump administration's petty, childish behavior has significantly damaged the US response to this crisis, both actively and passively.

Most other crises eventually fade from the news. Puerto Rico still isn't rebuilt but nobody cares anymore. etc etc. He hoped it would be a tempest in a teapot that blew over and it didn't. He's reluctantly come to terms with that in the last week.

If this whole question was a trap to make me say something downvotable, oh well, so be it, but it's all factually true and that's my honest opinion.

[paulmd]

If you'd like further confirmation:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/anthony-fauci-donald...

> According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, nearly everything the president has said about the coronavirus is wrong.

/shrug

Why do you think that would happen? Why would the president just contradict his subject experts with literally multiple decades of experience in this field? Why would he literally impede the state agencies from doing the testing necessary to monitor and oversee the status of the disease?

Why would he say the hurricane is going to curve into an entirely different state from where the NWS says it's going to go? Why would he then threaten to fire anyone who refuses to cook the forecasts to comply with his incorrect claims?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/climate/hurricane-dorian-...

Dude is an actual literal child who can't stand to not be the smartest guy in the room, and if anyone corrects him they're fired. He's a nightmare boss and the only reason anyone tolerates him is because he's "on their team" Anyone who does is going to end up like Romney: "not physically safe in our presence anymore".

Can't wait for the reversal in a couple years: "nobody ever supported this guy, everyone knew he was a crazy from day 1". But that's only going to be once he's out of office.

[jrockway]

I was also wondering about that. I had a pretty bad cold the second week of February after going to a party where some of my friends, who travel abroad extensively, were sick. It was different than the usual colds I get -- normally I just have a really bad sore throat and muscle pain for a week and a half, this time it was a dry cough and fever, but I honestly didn't feel all that bad. Obviously this matches the symptoms of Coronavirus, but also matches the symptoms of 99 billion other types of cold and flu.

I would like to think that I already got it, but in the end it probably doesn't matter. It is pretty unlikely that I am going to die from it, but it is pretty likely that we go into a recession and people pay less for my labor, stocks will be worth less, and food will be in short supply... so I think in the end, getting sick is just an annoyance (to me personally, I know people are dying) and the real problems come from everyone else getting sick. So either way, I'm sure it doesn't matter.

[pluto9]

Something really nasty swept through my office (in the US) at the end of January, and one employee actually died. Some of us were speculating that it could have been early cases of COVID-19, but symptoms only lasted for about 5 days for most of us. From what I can find online, COVID symptoms tend to last about 10-14 days.

[paulmd]

There's some suspicion that there are two strains of COVID and one is nastier than the other.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scientists-identified-strains-...

https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...

And, see my other post, but some researchers suspect that COVID was circulating in Washington (likely elsewhere as well) since about mid-january, so very possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22551360

[pluto9]

Interesting. I suppose it's possible. Whatever went around was incredibly contagious compared to the usual flu. Almost the entire office, including myself, came down with it over the course of 1-2 weeks.

I'd like to think you're right. It'd be nice to know that I and the people I'm in regular contact with already have some immunity.

[maoeurk]

I got extremely sick with the flu (confirmed influenza type A by test) at the end of January/early February this year in San Francisco despite being vaccinated. I've had the flu once or twice before but I don't remember it being this bad.

It lasted about 5-7 days and came with a high fever, full body pain and soreness to the extent that any type of movement was difficult, delirium and confusion, difficulty eating, and vomiting for 1-2 days (which isn't typical of the flu as I understand it).

I'm 24 and generally in very good health and felt that without modern medicine and sanitation I could have easily died from this. I lost about 5% of my body weight and a lot of muscle.

The reaction to COVID-19 makes me wish we, as a society, took preventative health more seriously in general as the common diseases can be extremely nasty too.

In fact from everything I've heard about COVID-19, it sounds like it wouldn't have been nearly as bad for someone my age as the flu was for me this year.

[clairity]

if they had flu-like symptoms, it's unlikely covid-19, because you typically have a lot of mucus in your cough, and covid-19's symptoms are principally (1) high fever and (2) dry cough.

[paulddraper]

It would have to have nowhere even close to 1%+ mortality rates in order for it to escape detection.