'Coronavirus circulating in Italy since September'

[GreenOwlBlue]

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-anitbodies-covid-study-b1723243.html

So, of 1000 asymptomatic people who took part in a lung cancer screening programme, 111 were found to already have Covid antibodies when the samples were tested. Wow.

What I don't understand is how the virus can circulate unnoticed for so long, when we've seen 2 big peaks involving large numbers hospitalised/dying?

Interesting stuff.

[User158340]

I don't know if it's mutations, super spreaders or what. It exploded in Lombardy in February and wiped the hospitals out within weeks. How did it not happen anywhere in Europe sooner?

[GreenOwlBlue]

It doesn't make sense does it. Unless the peaks only occur when it's absolutely rampant with vast numbers of asymptomatic people? But then the Liverpool mass testing doesn't suggest this is the case?

Amazing how much we still don't know about this virus...

[Melassa]

Yes, but these were based on serological tests, not swabs, which have a high % of false positives (at least in the early stages of availability). Plus the results also picked up other corona viruses such as the common cold, therefore this announcement requires further analysis.

[MythicalBiologicalFennel]

I read somewhere that analysis of sewer material showed that Covid was circulating in Barcelona in spring 2019 - yes, that's 2019.

Yep this is an interesting pandemic.

[Jrobhatch29]

That's really interesting!

[littlealexhorne]

I don't see how its possible, unless it was originally much milder and then mutated into what we've seen this year, otherwise where were all the excess deaths?

[movingonup20]

It's definitely a bit of an enigma. There's apparently healthy middle aged people dying in days yet I didn't even get a cough despite being overweight. (Only knew I had it because I lost taste)

[TheSunIsStillShining]

@MythicalBiologicalFennel

I read somewhere that analysis of sewer material showed that Covid was circulating in Barcelona in spring 2019 - yes, that's 2019.

Yep this is an interesting pandemic.

Could you link in the study? This is highly unlikely

[MotherTruckerr]

Here's the study, I have no clue about how reliable the findings are: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1

[Delatron]

I think more evidence will come out to show it was circulating much earlier than we thought.

There was satellite evidence showing increased activity around Wuhan hospitals in August. No proof but interesting. Then that huge sporting event in Wuhan in October where many competitors fell ill with a mystery virus.

Do we really believe China that it was only discovered at the end of December?

The WHO has told countries to go back and look at Xrays from last autumn.

We don’t know why it took until March for us to see the huge impact on death rates. Maybe it circulated for months amongst the younger and healthier populations. Maybe a low flu year covered some of the first deaths. But we are seeing lots of evidence now to support the theory this virus a has been around longer than is claimed.

[DameFanny]

These responses seem pretty reasonable

[TheSunIsStillShining]

Thanks!
It sounds very scientific, unfortunately I can't tell if the fragments they were looking at can be generated by other corona viruses. It's in pre-print, so other scientists will have a stab at analyzing who actually understand it. :)
Bookmarked it.

I usually put the pre-print warning next to stuff like this as it cannot be taken at face value and most ppl won't be able to evaluate the content

[CoffeeandCroissant]

Prof Francois Balloux, UCL Genetics Institute.
mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1328058398517190656

Andrew Rambaut, Professor of Molecular Evolution | University of Edinburgh.
mobile.twitter.com/arambaut/status/1327985409331257345

[Ellmau]

September 2019? That's really interesting.

I had an awful several-week cough in the second half of September 2019 after coming back from Austria. I thought it was too soon to be Covid, but I have wondered...

[PicsInRed]

Evidence does suggest the European strain mutated to be not more deadly, but more infectious.

So perhaps earlier cases infected fewer people (lower R) and therefore it burned away at a low level, slowly infecting more and more mobile/travelling people, until it mutated to have a higher R, got into ski resorts, school hols happened, skiiers returned to the family homes of Europe, then covid entered care homes and hospitals, and then it all absoutely exploded.

I believe I probably had it last year, with really painful pleurisy in late October, got a little better...then coughed, hacked and choked all through November. Whatever it was, it was downright nasty.

[MushMonster]

It does make sense to me that the virus did start spreading before they noticed larger number of viral pneumonia in hospitals, so they started analysing samples and came across the new virus. By then there should be quite a large number of symptomatic cases.
And by the time the decided to close Wuhan, the virus was already in the move across the world.
I cannot visualise how it could have spreaded so fast otherwise, even being so infectious.
But some of those publications strike me as far far too early.

[feellikeanalien]

DM died of pneumonia in December. It does make you wonder. But Dad didn't get it so surely he would have had it too.

[thecatsatonthewall]

I was very poorly in December, dry cough, Diarrhea, very high fever, loss of taste/smell
I also had very low blood pressure and low SATS, i was ill for about 6 weeks.

At the time, put it down to flu (despite a jab) but my GP warned me to look out for Pneumonia as many in the area where getting flu then a chest infection.

Subsequently, he is certain i and many others had CV, i'm not so sure as many winter viruses are horrible but it should be looked into further because it then raises the possibility CV never originated in China.

[BahHumbygge]

"What I don't understand is how the virus can circulate unnoticed for so long, when we've seen 2 big peaks involving large numbers hospitalised/dying?"

It's simply the nature of exponential growth.

Don't think about this too much, just give an instinctive answer... would you rather have a penny a day for a month, doubled, ie day 1 = £0.01, day 2 = £0.02, day 3 = £0.04 etc. Or a million pounds straight up?

Did you choose the million pounds? Here's what you could have won on day 31





£10,737,418.24

If I halt the doubling a smidge early on day 27, you'd get £671,088.64, a big difference to the nearly £11 M. Most of the days of the month the numbers are mundane, unimpressive sums of money. Same with the numbers of viral infections in a population, numbers are very small to start with in a country with a population of c 60 million. Case 0 lands at the airport shedding the virus, infects the passport control officer and the taxi driver. They each pass it on to two other people and two more each in turn. It's september, they likely have reasonable vitamin D levels as it's late summer, so most of them just notice feeling a bit off/fatigued for a few days and a scratchy throat. Continues to spread into October, a few tens of people now. Levels of vitamin D are declining, people's potential to get more sick is enhanced. Cases start showing up in GP surgeries with bad coughs/pneumonia. The doctor thinks the couple of cases they've seen seem slightly unusual this year, but hey it's that time of year for chest infections and people can present idiosyncratically. Cases start showing up in hospital, where the radiologists start noticing unusual patterns in the chest xrays, enough to make them think hmm and casually mention it to their shift colleague, but no where near the level the threshold that the lightbulb goes on that it's a novel pathogen they're dealing with. A handful of people die, but it's mixed in with the statistical "noise" from influenza and conventional pneumonias in the winter flu season. A few weeks pass and the virus is stealthily trundling round the population, doubling every few days, there's more chatter on medical forums there's something going on... meanwhile reports are coming out of China of a new virus. Then the "oh shit" moment hits in Europe where the tipping point in the hockey stick graph is reached and turns to a steep upward trajectory, hospitals suddenly become overwhelmed with patients.

There was an outbreak of an mystery cough/pneumonia respiratory illness that killed two residents in a nursing home in Virginia in JULY 2019. 53/263 became sick. Normally they only see such respiratory illnesses and deaths in winter. Could quite possibly have been covid, and small pockets of it were very slowing spreading, gradually picking up momentum.

edition.cnn.com/2019/07/11/us/virginia-retirement-community-respiratory-illness-outbreak/index.html

wjla.com/news/local/mystery-virus-greenspring-retirement-cdc-va

[EleanorOalike]

I was doing cover work in several schools in December 2019 and January 2019 and found that lots of the students and staff were unusually ill. When I was on duty I had multiple students burning up and coughing and having to go home mid lesson, one girl passed out from not being able to breathe, several were coughing so hard they were coughing up blood and if I had a pound for everyone who said “I had a cough for weeks and then I got tonsillitis” or “I can’t get rid of this cough, I’ve had it 6 weeks now!” I would have been very rich. My colleagues in the schools all said there had been an awful chest infection and cough doing the rounds and they’d never known anything like it. My friend is a singing teacher at a drama school and privately.
He said she barely had any students in January and early February as everyone was coming down with coughs, fever and “tonsillitis” and they were unable to sing for 6/8 weeks...again some were coughing up blood. A couple of her students ended up in hospital with pneumonia. In my hometown a friend’s toddler was diagnosed with pneumonia caused by a coronavirus on Christmas Eve at our local hospital- I’ve seen the discharge note. My family member almost certainly had Covid-19 over Christmas and New Year 2019 (very ill, in hospital, tested positive for antibodies in the first batch of antibodies testing in Spring). He lived in rural NI.

It was circulating well before, I’m certain of it.

[WhySoSensitive]

Im not surprised. Both me and my baby were very sick in dec/January, he was admitted to hospital at 4 months old and I was bed ridden, we assumed it was flu but every dr said it was a ‘flu like viral response’ but couldn’t tell us what it was. As I recovered DH got sick, we all recovered around the same time (after about another two weeks)
I’m absolutely convinced it was what is now corona.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

@PicsInRed

Evidence does suggest the European strain mutated to be not more deadly, but more infectious.

So perhaps earlier cases infected fewer people (lower R) and therefore it burned away at a low level, slowly infecting more and more mobile/travelling people, until it mutated to have a higher R, got into ski resorts, school hols happened, skiiers returned to the family homes of Europe, then covid entered care homes and hospitals, and then it all absoutely exploded.

I believe I probably had it last year, with really painful pleurisy in late October, got a little better...then coughed, hacked and choked all through November. Whatever it was, it was downright nasty.

I thought it had mutated before it got to Europe. I think it is a less common in parts of Asia but was introduced from there. Whereas it’s patent strain is more common in Asia but doesn’t transmit easily in Europe.

I’d be surprised at this point if anything pointed to an earlier timeline than the one we already have for it’s origin in Oct/Nov last year. There’s an awful lot of genomic data analysis we’d have to disregard.

[DobbyTheHouseElk]

I’ve said this before. But my healthy, slim, young boss was unwell in Dec. ICU with a coronavirus. He was tested for all known coronavirus but all negative, yet the hospital said he had a coronavirus.

He didn’t get back to work til mid March. He is utterly convinced he had COVID-19 in Dec. All the symptoms.

Also another friend had an awful virus in Dec. Her cough didn’t stop til end of feb. She had pneumonia and bronchitis. Couldn’t breathe and felt very unwell.

[toptreeroots1]

Not buying it personally

[AlecTrevelyan006]

officially the first death in the UK from coronavirus was a woman in her 70s on 5 March
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51759602

but many people suspect there cases before that e.g. 64-year old Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill who died from a respiratory illness on 1 February. Gill had not long returned from an Asian tour which included what turned out to be the band's last gig, in Shanghai on 23 November 2019
www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51344348

...

i think it is certainly possible that some people in Europe died with covid in late 2019 early 2020 but it was not recorded as such