On a conference call just heard this same thing from two people on it in two different parts of the country.
The only way to know is by anti-body testing, and since many infected show no symptoms, just because you turn up positive for having COVID-19 in the past doesn’t necessarily mean the illness was caused by it.
Unfortunately this anecdote has been misused by a certain agenda-driven segment of society to say “See? The virus was here all along! We’re immune----let’s get back to work!”
Fair enough…but if the false positives are considerably larger than the prevalence, then you have to know the false positive rate to very high accuracy to determine the prevalence. For example, in the Santa Clara study of prevalence of the antibodies, the uncertainty in the false positive rate appears to be the dominating factor in the uncertainty (and the authors didn’t properly account for it).
[I am also curious as to how the manufacturers can determine the false positive rate at this point. What population can they use where they can be certain that they should all test negative?]
I got good and sick in January, but it lasted only 3 days. It was like the flu with lethargy- lots of sleeping. The weird thing is, a coworker and I called in sick the same day, and later talking about it, we seem to have had the same thing. But I don’t think it was covid-19 because of the infectious nature of that. It was just us 2 guys, and we both were knocked out for just a couple of days.
There was something floating around in late summer on through mid-autumn. I had it and then gave it to other people. For me the symptoms were a cough that was not preceded by nasal congestion and the usual sore post-nasal-drip throat, then the cough got worse, felt like shit for a day or so with chest soreness, then a very very very long tailing off of the cough. My partner got it worse when she got it from me: for nearly two months she could scarcely make it from the car to the front door, wheezing and gasping and holding onto things; then she got better, but the act of changing posture – most notably when she first lay down at night to sleep and again on first getting up and out of bed – continued to prompt a prolonged round of coughing long after the worst of it was over.
Neither of us missed any work over it, it was more annoying than incapacitating, although we were both getting worried about her short-windedness.
The timing makes it immensely improbably that it was coronavirus – it would have meant it was in New York before it hit Wuhan, but somehow wasn’t wiping out the NYC area until March of 2020!
But whatever it was, it was definitely around and could have been what hit some people in January and February.
I suspect that I may have had a mild case before it was publicly identified, and I wasn’t sick enough to pursue medical treatment. I had a “slight cold” that lasted a few days, went away for a few days, and then the same symptoms came back and lasted, you guessed it, a few days.
Earlier today, I was at the gas station and saw a woman I know. In addition to agreeing that we’re better off doing all this and not having to, she said that she has a neighbor who had a hacking cough with a fever and bone-crushing fatigue a few months ago, and his doctor said that it wasn’t influenza but they’d been seeing a lot of this.
Most likely, it was a different strain of the virus.
Given that we don’t know how many people are sick today, it’s hard to work back and figure out how many people must have been sick at any given period in the past.
The article that I read didn’t indicate whether any of the people had come back from abroad or knew anyone from abroad. Whether it was community spread or not would be a pretty significant determinant on whether we’re talking mid-January for patient-0 or earlier.
That said, I would expect that it’s easier for a disease to cross the country than to come from Europe. Despite that, the East Coast brand seems to have mostly come from Europe, at last report, telling us that the West Coast locked down early enough to not impact the East Coast (roughly the end of February, start of March, through corporate recommendations to work from home, previous to the government policies being put into place).
If you’re doubling every 2.5 days, you go:
Day 0: 1
Day 5: 4
Day 10: 16
Day 15: 64
Day 20: 256
Day 25: 2048
If 3 people died in the first few days of February, though, it implies that ~300 people (if we assume a 1% fatality rate) were infected around 11-12 days earlier (e.g. Jan 22). And that would, further, imply that patient zero showed up about 21 days earlier (Jan 1).
That would match what we would expect - that someone came back to the US from China after visiting relatives over the holidays.
However, it seems difficult to have > 2048 people sick at the end of January and not pass the illness off to the East Coast, somehow.
But we definitively now know that there were deaths at the start of February, so I think the safer assumption is that the West Coast did start to spread things by February, out into the rest of the country. However, someone from Europe came in to New York by mid-January and that version simply outcompeted the Western bug.
I can’t imagine how I would have gotten covid, but I had a nasty cold the last week of February. I usually have the same expression of symptoms lasting around the same length of time. This was way different. I had a severe headache for a few days, no fever, but massive fatigue. I slept for 18 hours two days in a row. I don’t do that. The last time a bug did that to me was in 1999 when I’m sure I got the flu. Since that last week of February I’ve had a persistent dry cough. Not all day, every day, but more than an occasional throat clearing. It is so much more likely I had a weird-presenting cold and then early seasonal allergies that are continuing, but part of me keeps saying “But it was so unusual for you”. And my kid has the cough too, but it could also be allergies to the same things. Kid never got a fever although there were a few days of being flushed that could have been just playing in the sun. Neither of us had this cough any other year for allergies and previous colds I had were more wet and productive and gone way before the 2 month mark.
I would love a serology test, but we would be such low priority since we didn’t have contact with a positive person, nor severe and/or typical symptoms. It would be nice to know if I had had it I could relax just a tiny bit (just a little because it’s still inconclusive about re-infection rates). And again, I can’t imagine how I got it when I don’t know anyone who had it, but this cold was just so weird for me.
So, those of you who are describing recent illnesses, have you ever been ill with similar symptoms before 2019? Because the things you’re describing sound like mild to severe colds. What made these instances especially different?
Four days before my mom died, I developed a cough, and I was surprised to get sick over a week after she first did. By the next day I couldn’t get out of bed. I was awake 4 hours - not in a row - the entire day. I ached all over, my cough was worse day 2 and I had a 101F fever, and chills. I slowly got a little better over the next 2 days except the unrelenting cough but my parents got worse. My mom got a lot worse. Shortly before she died they determined that she had influenza A and pneumonia.
The day after she died Dad and I were tested for the flu but we were both negative - they prescribed me cough medicine with codeine so I could sleep for more than 2 hours at a time. Dad insisted he was “ok” but the doctors disagreed and decided he was sick enough that they put him in the hospital too for a few days. As far as anyone could tell it was just a bad cold we coincidentally acquired while Mom had the flu, and Dad got so sick because his COPD wasn’t being treated properly.
This was in March of 2016 so it obviously wasn’t the coronavirus virus. The point is there have always been viruses around that make you feel briefly awful, especially in winter months. And it worries me that there are so many people who apparently forget this - I don’t want to see them really get the coronavirus and pass it along to more vulnerable people because they are convinced without evidence that they had it and are less careful because of their mistaken assumption.
My wife was in the hospital in January with what they called Flu and double pneumonia. She didn’t have the body pain and loss of sense of smell. It could have been. Interested in seeing what antibody test says once she actually takes it. In for 4 nights, she really lost the whole month
The 2019-2020 influenza season slightly exceeded epidemic levels of pneumonia & influenza mortality (which was expected) and that first peak occurred well before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China. There are also the usual number of infectious respiratory illnesses circulating that you get in the winter and humid spring months in addition to the COVID-19 epidemic.
Stranger
I’ve read many accounts from hospitals that the symptoms and course of severe cases of COVID-19 are unusual and distinctive. How on earth is it possible that the virus could have been spreading so much earlier and causing mild flu-like symptoms in some people, yet not hospitalizing and killing vulnerable people as it does now?
It is possible that those who had severe symptoms/deaths were misdiagnosed. January and earlier, COVID-19 was limited to central China according to public knowledge, but it is very possible it was circulating in China earlier than “officially” reported, which would mean it had an earlier escape out of China and no one knew what it was, and attributed serious illnesses to the seasonal flu.
A headache seems to be a differentiator for COVID19. There is a really nice table on this (scroll down) webpage that shows a headache is uncommon for COVID19 but common for the flu.
I really like that site. Also, that table of differentiation is great. It really shows how to separate out COVID19 from other, similar, ailments. Of course, nothing is 100%, and a headache is uncommon for COVID19, so it could still be possible have had COVID19 with a headache. Not having a fever is uncommon as well. So two of the symptoms you describe are uncommon for someone with COVID19.
That seems implausible to me. If severe cases were hitting hospitals but misdiagnosed, that would have led to rapid spread inside the hospitals, surely with dramatic and highly visible consequences.
The problem with this theory is that it’s not consistent with the pattern of serious illnesses and deaths.
(I am going to nitpick here and point out that you only have COVID-19 if you have symptoms; if you aren’t, you are carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but you do not technically have COVID-19. Whatever.)
If most people had gotten the virus in January and early February, the spike in illnesses would have happened shortly after; the best estimate is an AVERAGE (average average average, I know some are much quicker and some much longer) period of 4-7 days of asymptomatic infection before showing symptoms. If a huge number of people got hit by the virus between January 15 and February 15, hospitalizations should have spiked in February and deaths would probably spike very shortly after, though in moving to deaths we get into some conflating factors in terms of the epidemiology. In fact, however, right now the peak in the USA, as well as here in Canada, is in early April (and it might get worse, as reporting catches up.) Why would that happen if there was a huge hidden infection sweep 8-12 weeks prior?
I mean, it’s not impossible that the virus sits around in the system for WAY longer on average than we think before exploding into COVID-19, but I am unaware of any direct evidence of that.
I mean, I hope I’m wrong. If we all got it months ago, this will be over sooner than expected. I really don’t think it’s true though.
This is exactly correct. We know from what tracking and tracing has been done that the virus is resident in presymptomatic patients for a period of about 6 to 10 days; it is has been suggested that this period could be as long as 21 days, but it seems unlikely that a patient would be as contagious during the entirity of the presymptomatic phase compared to symptomatic patients (though the potential for aerosol spread even outside of intubation would increase estimates of congatiousness). However, we’ve seen how the epidemic has advanced in New York, Detroit, and New Orleans, the virus tends to spread and be expressed in newly infected people within a 2 to 3 weeks. So, if the virus had been around much before March, we would have been seeing the kind of outbreaks that we saw in New York City much later, just as we saw mass outbreaks in Italy and Spain earlier…
Stranger
Yes, exactly. If mild to moderate flu-like symptoms in January or early February were COVID-19, it would require the following pattern:
Less vulnerable people who end up with only mild or moderate flu-like symptoms get them within a short time; but the vulnerable people who end with much more severe symptoms show no symptoms at all for a much longer period, and then start getting hospitalized and dying only a month or more later.
Statewide study, at groc stores, shows13.9 percent of N.Y. residents have COVID-19 antibodies.
So says Gov. Cuomo.
He may be spouting nonsense, but that leaves room for a lot of people to have it, and maybe not be terribly infective.
I spoke with my child’s pediatrician on an unrelated issue and he was fully aware of my kid’s symptoms and suggested a test. So that was a little startling. I don’t know if he was placating me or was concerned because of the persistent cough we both have had (which started before allergy season). I don’t think I want to put my kid through a test when at most it’ll just confirm a 1% chance thing. I have to see my doctor for a regular check up and some other things so if my doctor is as concerned as my kid’s doc, I guess I’d take the test.
And even if it weirdly came back positive, there’s not enough re-infection data out there for me to be comfortable saying “We’re freeeeeeee!” and go do stuff. I don’t even know if I did test positive that I could donate anything because I’m not eligible do donate blood. It’d be just a little factoid I couldn’t do anything with.
MrsRico is just now recovering (at home) from a severe respiratory ailment that manifested after we spent a week in Monterey (mid-February) ending with a day at the crowded Monterey Bay Aquarium. She had a bad URI - but otherwise no COVID symptoms like fever, dry cough, headache, or taste loss. Probably only another “nasty winter bug” caught in the throngs. I’ve had no more sniffles than usual. And we’ve been pretty isolated in our remote cabin since returning. I’ve walked (masked and gloved) into very few stores.
Are we infected from Monterey and asymptomatic now? Who knows? We don’t qualify for testing. Without testing it’s all guesswork.