[unlikelymordant]

It seems to me that the death rate and transmissability of the wuhan strain of covid means it is unlikely it was around in other countries prior to its discovery in china, the deaths would have been noticed. Is it more likely that a less lethal strain was circulating, a few people developed antibodies, then it mutated in wuhan to become the more deadly version?.

This would explain early antibodies, the lack of corresponding deaths in europe,but we also know how easy this thing mutates now.

[rguiscard]

I agree with your argument. Wuhan strain may not be the first one which jumps from animals to human, but surely the first one to cause widely spread infection.

[native_samples]

This is very difficult to say.

In many countries COVID has not been a particularly deadly disease. Large numbers of recorded deaths "with COVID" obscure this but e.g. 2021 in the UK was about as deadly as 2015, 2020 was about as deadly as 2007 and in Sweden 2020 was about as deadly as 2012. So in all cases similar levels of death have been within the living memory of children. That is biased upwards and confounded by lockdown and healthcare-restriction deaths also, of course. ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities, so if China had never announced COVID, if mass testing had never started, if there'd been no panic, it's not totally clear to what extent it'd have surfaced into the public consciousness in Europe. It'd probably have been noticed by doctors and specialists.

Now, in the USA things are worse. It's still not really explained why, but most likely due to obesity levels. Also USA stats are hard to work with because overall mortality had been going up for quite some time before COVID unlike in other places where it was slowly falling, so there are maybe deeper underlying problems there that this exposed.

But let's put all that to one side. The question of how long SARS-CoV-2 has been around gets into the question of what a 'strain' is. This is a question of semantics and how virology classifies viruses.

Unfortunately here things get very murky. There is a classification system for viruses that tries to decide if they are a 'variant' of SARS-CoV-2 called Pango. It takes as given that SARS-CoV-2 originates in Wuhan and all detected variants must be slottable into a family tree derived from two original sequences found there. There are some rules about how to do that but they are being frequently changed and this tree can, it seems, go on forever, as there's no rule that says "anything mutated more than X from the original Wuhan sequence is a different strain". All the rules are relative to entries already in the tree. So it's possible that according to virology there will never be a time when SARS-CoV-2 isn't endemic even if its behaviour and RNA changes totally. Additionally, COVID is defined as "presence of any variant classed by Pango as SARS-CoV-2". Thus the symptoms of COVID as a disease can also change totally without it ever being declared gone.

Arguably this is already happening with Omicron.

So ultimately the state of play in the public health/virology world is such that the papers claims can't really be evaluated precisely. For that you'd need a precise RNA-based definition of what SARS-CoV-2 actually is, and/or a precise clinical definition of what COVID is, but no such definitions exist.

[unlikelymordant]

> ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities

I dont think this is material, covid kills a lot of people with comorbidities, and there are a lot of people with comorbidities. You can see it extremely clearly in the all cause mortality, the peaks line up with the peaks in covid diagnoses. You would never miss that many extra deaths. New york hospitals were a lot more full than usual during the first wave. There is no hiding that.

And countries like australia, who have had very low covid infections, but have had lockdowns, have shown not even a blip in all cause mortality. So lockdowns are not the thing causing deaths, its the covid.

[native_samples]

"covid kills a lot of people with comorbidities, and there are a lot of people with comorbidities"

Yes undoubtably, but the question is to what extent those deaths would have been recorded as COVID in the absence of mass hysteria. In the UK COVID was very rapidly put on the "notifiable diseases" list which makes how cases/deaths are reported and classified much more aggressive.

Consider that the average age of a COVID death is over 80, it's actually over the average life expectancy. For many of these cases they'd actually be either asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms, and if COVID had been treated as a normal respiratory outbreak then it'd never have been made notifiable meaning the recorded cause of death would be different.

"You would never miss that many extra deaths"

Who is "you"? People who study mortality stats would have noticed it and it'd be ascribed to a coronavirus outbreak, but would the average person have noticed anything? The difference in mortality between now and (say) 2012 is so small that you'd not know it existed if the media/government weren't telling everyone about it every day. If I think about my own life, I don't know a single person in two years who's died, not even one that's been hospitalized. Lots of people who got it, of varying ages, but it was just a rough few days and then they always recovered.

In another world, this could have passed without me ever knowing anything was happening. It's just not directly observable by the vast majority.

"And countries like australia, who have had very low covid infections, but have had lockdowns, have shown not even a blip in all cause mortality. So lockdowns are not the thing causing deaths, its the covid."

Parts of Australia have done yes, but they didn't tell people they had a moral duty to not go to hospital, or flood care homes with infected people. "Lockdowns" is a term that encompasses a lot of really stupid stuff governments did, especially at the start.