[aphextron]

I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.

[eynsham]

Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections in the US before they were first detected; they don’t suggest that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is plausible, ‘almost impossible’ looks to me like it’s rather understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of Covid.

[happytoexplain]

I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.

[rsynnott]

If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu.

What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.

[happytoexplain]

Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID.

As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.

[rsynnott]

I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu.

I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.

[stordoff]

I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough, full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19, particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases.

I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the first illness was something else.

[stadium]

Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very ill as well.

I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with each case.

All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death bed.

[NoOneNew]

Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion, which I normally should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like, crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later. No one else around me caught it.

[toast0]

My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms point more towards whooping cough.

Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.

[comeonseriously]

We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.

[e40]

Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break. Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect that pretty much nails it as covid for me.

[faeyanpiraat]

First time I’ve seen i18n used like this in the wild.

[e40]

We're among friends here, so I didn't even give it a 2nd thought... :)

[qqqwerty]

Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard. I am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the timing was definitely odd.

[dragonwriter]

> But the timing was definitely odd.

A nasty cold or flu hitting in the middle of cold and flu season isn’t that odd, as timing goes.

Sure, in 2020 it’s a coincidence that naturally raises the “was it COVID?” question, but not really odd timing if it wasn’t.

[mattlondon]

Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had covid in the past few months prior.

Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.

I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had not had Covid.

The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).

[qqqwerty]

In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have caught covid.

And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was definitely something that was going around at that time.

[InitialLastName]

I had one of the flu variants (tested positive for flu) from 2019-20 in December, followed by a really bad cold (no tests) in Feb, followed by COVID (confirmed by tested contacts, an antibody test and a fully checked "weird COVID symptoms" bingo card) in March.

2019-20 was definitely a season for nasty colds/flus, not just COVID.

[qqqwerty]

The timing was odd because of how severe the cough was. I have had plenty of colds through out my life, and this was by far the worst.

[asdff]

Another variable is that you are also older with a less robust immune system than when you've had colds in your youth. This is why anecdotes are always worthless. You need statistical power to overcome these latent variables that could be biasing your conclusions.

[ssully]

It's possible you had covid, but I think the odds are stronger that you just had a different respiratory illness that was going around at the time.

[jagger27]

Did anyone from your office later catch covid? If anyone did, the lack of immunity would suggest it wasn't.

[qqqwerty]

Not that I am aware of.

[newsbinator]

I had something similar in 2017