Do you remember this Covid news footage?

[Sitonyourdressmavis]

Chatting to SIL last night and we were remembering news footage we watched before the Christmas of Covid when the news was coming out of China about this virus. We clearly remember watching as a family news footage (would have been on BBC normal news not online) from China of people collapsing and fitting in the streets then being zipped up on stretchers and body bags and loaded into a black and yellow van by hazmat suited doctors/army. We all clearly remember this , it was not a film. What was this footage? Covid didn't present like that at all? We remember being really scared. SiL is a nurse and we remember her saying "what the hell is this thing"
Anyone else remember this footage?

Also, if in March 2020 you thought "actually that nasty virus X had in Dec 2019 could have been covid". That is also not evidence that you knew about covid in early Dec 2019.

At the risk of falling down a conspiracy rabbit-hole of my own, this has been the first thread to make me wonder whether Putin is sowing disinformation and discord on MN now. It's hard to believe those who are doubling down on the "this was the talk of the town pre-Christmas" line are genuine, or even believe it themselves.

I attached a nature paper showing twitter activity for ‘pneumonia’ worldwide chat from 15/12/2019 had clearly increased significantly over prior flu seasons

Here’s a summary of the findings - in case posters are unaware nature is probably the most respected science journal there is

Using the same procedure, we also computed the K–S and A–D tests to compare the cumulative distribution of number of tweets citing pneumonia in the winter season 15 December 2019–21 January 2020 with the distributions for each of the corresponding seasonal periods since 2014. For each country, Supplementary Figs. S2 and S3 show the average of the p values obtained using each of the five winter seasons from 2014–2015 to 2018–2019, and computed from the K–S and A–D tests, respectively. Once again, the p values related to each individual season are averages over moving window widths w computed with daily frequency. For each country, Supplementary Tables S3and S4 report, respectively, the values of the K–S and A–D statistical tests (and corresponding p values) comparing the 2019–2020 winter season with each of the preceding five seasons individually. Findings from all these tests are in agreement with previous results: with the exception of Germany, in the winter season 2019–2020 all selected European countries witnessed an excess posting of pneumonia-related tweets, with cumulative distributions that are statistically different from the ones obtained from each of the five preceding corresponding winter seasons.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I'm a little confused by this study. All it shows is that other countries had people talking about flu like pneumonia? It doesn't show that this pneumonia was related to what eventually became COVID? 2019 was already a bad year for the flu wasn't it so anyone talking about it before Christmas 2019 seems just coincidental?

That Nature paper is very interesting, but although it analysed tweets from 1 December onwards it talks about significant increases in mentions of pneumonia and dry cough during January and February. If you're looking for an increase in something, it is standard to begin your analyses before the increase occurred - that way, you can see when it started to go up.

They do start before and they compare to prior seasons to show the increased chatter was significantly higher than the normal.

It actually wasn't a bad year for flu. There were early concerns that it might be, but it didn't come to anything.

Yes, I know they start before. That's my point. They start looking in early December, before chatter goes up. It then goes up significantly in January and February.

They adjusted for that and also included non flu chatter

To further check for robustness of findings, we also considered another common symptom that has been associated with COVID-19, i.e., dry cough10. Using the same procedure adopted for pneumonia (i.e., filtering out tweets induced by media exposure, comments of events reported in the news), we created a new data set containing all tweets mentioning dry cough, and computed the cumulative distribution of the number of such tweets.

It doesn't show that. Have another read.

Ok - sorry I misunderstood thank you for the clarification

I’ve just looked for any thread from 1st Jan 2020 to 15 Jan 2020 mentioning China or video. There is not one mention people watching anything on the news about people in China collapsing in the street. If so many people who claim to remember seeing it before Christmas then surely there would be something.

Yes, but that is a long way from people chatting about it in the pub over pre Christmas drinks.

This is one of the earliest threads about it here. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3801822-To-be-concerned-about-the-new-coronavirus

People posting from China, and one poster who has DD in the province next to Wuhan. No one seems all that worried, yet people think that a month before had there was footage on BBC teatime news about people dropping dead in the street.

@SitonyourdressmavisI remember seeing this news reports, can’t be sure on the dates but it caused a lot of panic and we discussed it in work A LOT.

It also says in that thread that news has been trickling in since November!

Which would indeed be a valid argument that it was being widely discussed before Christmas if anyone could find any shred of evidence to show where this news had been trickling in from? Any news report, social media post, video, letter or anything really?

Posted wrong thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3805469-are-you-worried-about-coronavirus?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

I’ve just searched for ‘footage’ and ‘China’ on here between 15th and 25th December 2019 and there was not a single mention of people seeing anything on the news, YouTube or social media

It does it’s you that needs to reread

I've definitely seen the footage. Can't remember the details though.

Can you quote the section that backs up "twitter activity for ‘pneumonia’ worldwide chat from 15/12/2019 had clearly increased significantly over prior flu seasons"

Fascinating thread. Just to see early views.

There's one comment that mentions November, and it doesn't actually provide any evidence of this. The comment was made at the end of January 2020, so it could easily be another case of a poster not being honest or accurate about the actual timelines. Just as there have been plenty of posters on this thread who have exaggerated timelines and dates. 🤷‍♀️