“Likely,” sure. But likelihoods, percentages, and odds only apply to groups. They only suggest but do not identify what happens or has happened to individuals.
It’s not so much the symptoms, but the combination of the symptoms, outcome, location and timing. Had she not died, in Washington state, in January, of something with the same symptoms, I would be extremely skeptical. As it is, I’m not entirely convinced that it was COVID-19, but I’m also not convinced it wasn’t COVID-19.
I think it’s interesting that there are a bunch of anecdotal reports of something that matches up pretty close to the reported COVID-19 symptoms, and that TPTB keep revising the first-case dates backward. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it is a reason to investigate, and I think we shouldn’t just assume that anything before a particular date was the flu.
There may be some aspects of this that we’re not aware of yet, or that we’ll only find out through some pretty intense analysis of historical data.
That seems to be the ONE thing we can be sure of. :dubious:
But the outcome is a strong reason to suspect that it wasn’t COVID-19. 30somethings with no health complications are extremely unlikely to die of COVID-19 (has there even been a single documented case of that happening?). And yes, it’s possible that any one single isolated case is an exception, but that’s not the way to bet.
My bold.
There’s that word “unlikely” again. And I’m not betting either way. It is a possibility. And there’s no way of knowing.
Apparently some young people are now dying. I don’t want to get into a debate on this, especially since the board is about to go belly-up in the next few–
Yes, it’s a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that Abraham Lincoln had it.
Maybe if you get extremely ill. Maybe from chest x-rays. But the cases mild enough to stay home just sound like every other viral bug out there.
Me, too. The first time a cold killed my sense of smell it really freaked me out. But I recovered. And that was more than a decade ago, so certainly not COVID.
I just don’t think you can tell from symptoms. I mean, you can tell “am I sick enough to see a doctor?”, but not, “do I have COVID?”
That doesn’t explain how it could have been circulating much earlier with only milder cases occurring. If it had been circulating earlier, there would have been serious cases with hospitalizations and deaths too. And if nobody knew what it was, they would all have been dealt with without PPE, so it would have spread like wildfire among vulnerable people in hospitals and nursing homes. How is it possible that either
(a) there were no serious cases; or
(b) nobody noticed the serious cases with distinctive symptoms, even in restrospect?
Maybe you think I’m arguing that people HAD covid earlier? I’m not. I’m pointing out that there’s tons of ordinary stuff that’s been out there for years that has symptoms similar to a mild case of covid. And that’s what I expect most of those January illnesses were – any of the many bugs with similar symptoms.
COVID infection outcomes may be getting a bit better as we figure out how to manage symptoms. At the beginning, the US was using a ventilator protocol that seems to have been harmful, for example.
Then your post #67 was not responsive to my comment that you quoted.
I was pointing out that severe cases and deaths from COVID-19 are distinctive. And we did not see them at that early stage. So it’s unlikely that mild symptoms (which have other possible causes) were attributable to COVID-19, since that would require that the virus was circulating but only causing mild cases.