[swang]

a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days.

i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.

[lamontcg]

If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips through there and kills about a third of them.

The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA.

The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible to think that it was floating around CES 2020.

The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long, although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and then it quickly becomes very, very fast.

It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very difficult to detect and the first several hundred people mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and then it can't be ignored.

If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself. You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.

[LapsangGuzzler]

> then people would have already been unmistakably dying.

Yeah, but the actual number of COVID dead has been a widely disputed topic and it's well established that excess deaths significantly increased during the pandemic, which indicates that a lot more people died overall that didn't go down as formal COVID cases[0]. It's very likely that early COVID deaths were not properly counted because we weren't in formal pandemic protocols yet.

Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available. I don't think it's a stretch at all to think that it had widespread reach early in 2020 when the research indicates that the actual number of COVID dead in 2020 is more than double what was officially reported.

From the piece I've linked below:

> On 30 January 2020 COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with an official death toll of 171. By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1 813 188. Yet preliminary estimates suggest the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million, representing 1.2 million more deaths than officially reported.

0: https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covi...

[lamontcg]

You're not quite understanding...

When it hits an elder care facility (particularly pre-pandemic where they're not taking any precautions) something like 1/3 of the residents die. They are more or less the canary in the coal mine. And it is not typical to have a respiratory virus rip through one of those facilities and kill so many people.

And doctors were on the alert in Jan and would have noticed a cluster of cases.

(And the lack of pandemic protocols means that the death toll would have been high -- and just like what actually happened with the Kirkland facility they would have been able to get tests -- and with a sudden high mortality outbreak like that they would have gotten the CDCs attention)

> Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available.

They probably caught asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic COVID.

And/or if you're talking antibody tests, the early ones had poor specificity and would give false positives.

Anecdotally there was the bodybuilder who thought he caught COVID early, tested positive on an early antibody test and later got decimated by the real virus. Decent chance he had a false positive.

[ipqk]

I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.

[taeric]

Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.

[lamontcg]

A common cold that turns into bronchial pneumonia can be substantially worse than SARS-CoV-2 in any given person.

That doesn't make the common cold worse than SARS-CoV-2 on average.

[taeric]

Honestly, odds are high I did have an early covid case. Was like an asthma attack with a few nights of fever. And I had every symptom. (Though, my understanding is loss of smell came and went as symptoms? I can't remember what the final call on that was.) I never got a confirmed test, as they weren't testing then.

Mostly irrelevant, as I don't think it would change anything else. Keep your distance and try not to get people sick is still good advice. I just offer it as understanding that there is a lot to be confused about on this. Kind of like early claims that kids couldn't get it. Which is asinine on evidence of everything kids spread through the family.

[lamontcg]

My understanding is that the loss of smell from early COVID tends to be fairly profound. It makes food disgusting. You can burn food on the stove and not smell it even after the fire alarm goes off. And it recovers slowly. It isn't like the usual changes in taste/smell during an infection which are mostly due to the symptoms of rhinitis and clear up when they clear up.

[mullingitover]

An article from the journal Lung[1] points out that Post-Viral Anosmia isn't exclusive to Covid[1]. It occurred with other viral infections, which is why you can have someone with a bunch of seemingly Covid-like symptoms but not have Covid. There's also this lit review[2] showing that destruction of the olfactory epithelium can occur in Parainfluenza virus, Human Coronavirus, and Rhinovirus.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8067782/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7236684/

[taeric]

Yeah, that was my understanding, and is what I had. Was odd to find I could breath just fine, but couldn't smell coffee.

Had a similar thing happen a year ago, where I couldn't even smell menthol rub. Could breath, just couldn't smell. That time, though, I was testing and never got a positive test. I thought, at the time, the general idea was that loss of smell wasn't a thing, anymore. Maybe not?

[kcplate]

I didn’t have anything early (I’ve never caught it despite multiple direct exposures, but I rarely get sick from anything anyway), but both my wife and son-in-law came back from separate business trips in late January/early Feb 2020 with all the classic symptoms. Both subsequently caught Covid in 2022 and both described the experience as very similar to their 2020 experiences.

No way to know for sure if it was Covid in 2020 since no testing at the time of their illness, but I would not be willing to bet against the possibility despite all the “it would have been impossible due to…” theorizing some folks have said on this thread.

[lamontcg]

late Jan / early Feb becomes more possible. there was certainly cryptic spread by then that was happening over airplane travel. both of them getting it would be unlikely though unless both of them were in china or italy or had contact with people from there.

but you simply cannot diagnose covid just via symptoms. every symptom that covid causes can be caused by other respiratory viruses, covid just makes it more likely that you'll get more severe symptoms.

2019/2020 cold and flu season, before covid showed up, was also a particularly bad year, with H1N1 back and influenza B spreading at the same time (plus RSV, common cold coronaviruses, human metapneumovirus and everything else).

[kcplate]

Oh certainly could have been another respiratory ailment, but the abundance of coincidence to timing, symptoms (which were quite severe), and a general assumption that it’s not over here just make me skeptical of claims that “it couldn’t be covid because…”

[lamontcg]

You can't diagnose COVID on the basis of severity though.

I caught absolutely the worst flu of my adult life (in fact might have been the only case of flu I've caught in my adult life), but it was 12 months earlier in Jan 2019 so I'm positive it wasn't COVID. Ran a 103F fever for 72 hours straight, probably should have gone to the ER, was wiped out for about a month afterwards with post-viral fatigue. Had it happened 12 months later it would have looked a lot like COVID. I suspect it was just H1N1 which was ripping around the globe again after having gone fairly quiet a few years after the 2009 pandemic (and I never caught it back in 2009). Basically the same H1N1 strain was still going around in the 19/20 season.

[karmicthreat]

There was a really bad flu that went around just before Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.

[tap-snap-or-nap]

We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.