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?

You have very limited paper evidence that you can join together in multiple ways!

Almost all humans have fallible memories.

Yep, I remember it, BBC started covering the mystery virus in China in around mid December, before Christmas.

I had a pre Christmas beer with a couple of mates, respectively a virologist and bacteriologist and it was quite the topic of conversation - living as I do in Salisbury, there is no shortage of virologists here due to the Porton labs up the road and there was a lot of interest going on at that time.

My virologist mate was convinced it would go global then, although the extent we didn't know.

I remember a BBC news piece about a British chap living in china who was one of the first to catch it, he was fine but he reckoned his kitten caught it and died.

The question was what exactly you wrote in your diary. Not a summary - the exact words, with precise dates.

We're not disputing that you and your family watched something but it cannot possibly have been the video you described on the BBC news.

It might have been a BBC news report about something else

Or a video from some social media site you watched on a phone or laptop or something

But you factually cannot have watched the video you described on the news because it wasn't on the news.

Just Google the broadcast and rewatch it.

OP - I’m waiting for you to provide a date when you wrote about it, and maybe tell us what you wrote.

This would have been in 2020 after the OPs dates.

They were the following year though. Our second school lockdown began in December so I am convinced some are remembering the December of 2020. School definitely were not aware in December 2019.

I remember the news showing military vehicles taking the dead from a hospital in Bergamot because there were so many. A convoy of them, it was absolutely terrifying. That was in the early days. I don't see why people think other footage wasn't real, it makes sense that the same experience took place in China a few months previously. I remember a story anecdotally of a family who tested positive on arrival in China, they were separated and in isolation for weeks, it was a scary story at the time that I only half believed it until I heard of the same happening in Europe.

I remember those early reports of people collapsing in the street but I do not remember the timeline. I think they were staged, well they were obviously staged as that is not how COVID worked.

China did try to cover it up for a while. The first Chinese doctor who came out to warn about it publicly disappeared soon after. There was a lot of bad information circulating at the start because people were panicking and ignorant of the facts.

Yet OP says there were school letter sent in December and reports on BBC and another poster says her work was affected. All before 30/12/19, they claim. This shows how impossible that is.

I remember this story. So sad.

Yes I remember seeing footage of people collapsing and being taken away but it wasn't on the news I saw it, I think it was independent media online. It was definitely a good bit before our lockdown.

@PandoraSocksno definitely not getting timeline mixed up it was pre Christmas. I just scrolled back to the parents year group chat and one of the mums asked if it was selfish they were going as they might at h the virus at the airport. The date of that WhatsApp was 11/12/19

I think the point is that the Chinese were much less open about this than Italy, so it's less likely there would be footage. We know the Wuhan police in the first week of January were harassing doctors like Li Wenliang who tried to talk about it.

Well it is a shame she didn't warn the UK government on 11/12/19 what was happening in China. Not to mention the WHO. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.

They absolutely were , there was a letter that the trip would go ahead

I remember this 🤣 but I watched it on social media etc. Don’t recall seeing it on the news but I 100% did see the videos you’re talking about

Thank you!

Yes I remember it

Do you write dates in your diary? Can you say exactly what the dates were? Or is it possible you might be looking at something written in January and thinking it's earlier? How exactly did you word it? Did you say "it was on the BBC news" or is it more like "we saw a clip" (which could have been online)?

COVID doesn't cause fitting - you could have seen a social media clip of someone with epilepsy or whatever, and maybe some commentary (from someone who obviously didn't know yet what the symptoms of this new disease were) linking it to rumours they'd heard of a disease in China. Or if it was someone actually deliberately trying to spread misinformation they could have had taken footage of someone fitting and spliced it together with footage from elsewhere of the stuff with body bags.

Sarcasm aside people warning in the early days didn’t get far, Li Wenliang for example.

But I'm now thinking that a pp was right and they were reporting before but not using the name COVID

As far as I'm aware, the virus was spreading in the human population in China from at least September.

These things take quite a long time to gain traction, the Black Death went on for several months in single or double digits of cases before going nuclear.

When the virus manages to jump from one species to another, it is still not perfectly aligned to its human host, it takes more evolution (which happens quickly) to become optimised to spreading human to human - that's what happened with Covid - once it had established an ability to bind to human cells well, it took off.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/a-man-lies-dead-in-the-street-the-image-that-captures-the-wuhan-coronavirus-crisis

Was it this article?

I don’t remember hearing about covid until Feb 2020