| 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. |