# Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Thread - 2020 Breaking News **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [February 11, 2020, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758 "2020-02-11T01:16:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 6267
**Author:** ![DMC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dmc/32/18049_2.png) [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2020, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758/6267 "2020-12-27T01:31:15Z")
> [@Tfletch1](#): > > By the way, the surge of “pneumonia” cases early in 2020 were probably Covid. Now that we have evidence that it was circulating in the US as early as December 2019, what we were calling pneumonia or even flu (some people could have been co-infected) was likely Covid. [I did some analysis earlier in the year in a different thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-excess-deaths-in-2020/920183/20) and found that the Pneumonia deaths reported in the first half of the year were such large outliers that they were 8.5 times the IQR above the third quartile. For reference, anything over 1.5 \* IQR is typically considered an outlier. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758)._