I don't believe that COVID only arrived in the Uk in February

[GlitterToast]

I remember in February (I think) when the apparent first case of corona came to the UK, and there was much talk of a "superspreader".

However, I am convinced that if the virus has been evident in China since November, then it would have arrived here much sooner.

Personally, I was horrendously ill in late January. Everyone told me that I had a bad cold, but it was honestly the worst cold I have ever had in my entire life. I kept having hot and cold flushes and I had an awful cough. I couldn't get out of bed for a week. I'm not saying that I had corona, but I had something awful.

I thought it had been reported that Brighton super spreader wasn’t patient zero, that another guy who returned from a ski trip to an Austrian resort hotel spot mid Jan was thought to be?

I guess it’s only a couple of weeks before Brighton guy who returned end of Jan (I think around 26th).

My colleague was convinced he had COVID-19 just before Christmas.

He went to take a private antibody test last week (they are actually available but they require in-person visits and professional blood tests) and his result came back negative. He either did not develop antibodies or - which is much more likely - his December sickness was in fact a just a bad flu.

Oxford Uni modelling said it's been here since mid January
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8148529/Coronavirus-infected-half-British-population-say-Oxford-University-experts.html
If they say that, it would surprise me if it was actually here before that, since it always takes the science a while to catch up with stuff. Before anyone jumps on me I am not dissing science here--I work with it every day. Just saying the nature of identifying a disease, and measuring and testing for it, is that it happens after the fact and sometimes quite some time after the fact.

Nah I don’t buy it. The imaging findings in covid are unusual. If it had been doing the rounds some of these people with horrendous fevers or cough or shortness of breath or pain would have got a CXR or CT scan. We didn’t start seeing it on xrays until 2-3 weeks ago. This was a long time after lots of these details had been published by doctors from China so everyone has been extra alert for it.

I am in Scotland so may be around longer in London but I am not buying early Jan or Christmas, especially with all the travels and parties at Christmas.

I can see why people who have had symptoms that match think this but I don't think there would have been such a quick acceleration to so many people in hospital and icu if it had been around that long given how contagious it seems to be. My DM thinks she had it before Christmas but I saw her several times when she was ill and didn't get it myself, which is strange as I pick up every illness I seem to come into contact with. I've spoken to other people who think they've had it but it seems odd that no one they came into contact with caught it from them. Perhaps it was a different strain of it but whatever the exact virus type causing all the deaths and hospitalisations now at such a rate is, I can't believe it's been around 4/5 months to have reached this stage now

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/878916 /Weeklyallcausemortalitysurveillanceweek152020report.pdf

Figure 1 in this report. There was something going round just before Christmas, but it's highly unlikely to have been Covid-19 or the graph would have carried on upwards then. It only does that at the very end (last 2 weeks).

The world at large was only made aware of this virus at the start of the year. It was much later that we learned the earliest cases in China were detected in November.

Anyone visiting a doctor with symptoms before Novembe would most likely have been treated for a chest infection or told they had flu. It takes time to identify a pattern. How long had covid 19 been in circulation in China before someone noticed that they were seeing a larger than average number of patients with chest infections/pneumonia? How long before further testing was carried out to discover this was in fact a novel virus?

I don't know if we will ever have the answer to these questions but it is not unreasonable to speculate there were cases in the UK before February.

We have based our modelling of spread on the figures from China, if they had many early undetected cases then this modelling would be inaccurate and our current infection and death rate would not indicate how long the virus has been in the UK.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/878916/Weekly_all_cause_mortality_surveillance_week_15_2020_report.pdf

Edited link

I've read a number of reports which suggest that the S strain was the version of the virus which transferred from animals to humans; this later mutated into the L strain which accounts for approximately 70% of current infections. It's possible that a critical mass of L strain infections was needed for widespread community transmission.

I'm speculating purely on the basis of things I've read, I'll remain very open minded until we have had time to really study the virus and the growth of this pandemic as I don't think we'll have reliable information until that has been done.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/10/uks-coronavirus-epidemic-may-have-seeded-outside-china-new-study/

This is interesting. Sorry I don't have access to the full article.

The thing is that if you had COVID in January, OP, then the majority of the people around would have caught it, some of them becoming seriously ill or potentially dying, and they would in turn have spread it exponentially. Did that happen?

The plain fact is that there were some pretty unpleasant bugs going around in January. I for one had an awful cough which at times caused me to have uncontrollable coughing fits to the point where I was vomiting, and it went on for two months. But I didn't have a fever, it wasn't a dry cough, and none of my family succumbed to it, nor any of my work colleagues, so I'm quite sure it wasn't Covid.

Wasn't there a study that said 30 million of us might have already had it?

Weird how half of us have apparently had it
through the winter, but it is only in the past fortnight that there’s been a surge in CV hospital admissions and deaths... Makes no sense at all.

Have you missed the 985 other threads with people saying the same thing.

Don't you think that if such a deadly virus had been circulating that early we might have noticed all the people dying and that we all have it now?

People seem to think that flu and colds have been magically replaced by COVID. I had flu back in January 2019.... no one is saying that could have been COVID, but now plenty of people will be saying “must have been COVID”.

In the early days, only a small minority of tests came back positive for COVID, which wouldn’t have been the case if it had been endemic since December as some people are mistakenly suggesting.

Assuming the UK ever gets around to any form of testing (and that's still not a given) it will interesting to compare the "people who had C-19" with "people who think they had C-19" and see how they line up.

I'm thinking they won't, and a lot of people who thought they had C-19 didn't. And therefore were not immune. And therefore (if they have been following guidelines) have hopefully saved themselves and others.

But until we have some sort of proper - and accurate - testing regime, it's all peoples guesses.

but if I had had it in January 2020, plenty of people would be saying it “must have been COVID!”

This just shows the silly situation that we are in. Lots of us have had infections which could be 'flu tonsillitis and so on. Or Covid 19. Until we are all tested firstly to see whether we really have it and secondly whether we have had it and are "immune" then we will never know.

@GlitterToast

I'm not a doctor or a scientist but I don't understand how there can have been such a sudden and dramatic surge in deaths and hospital admissions in the last couple of weeks if it's been here for months and is so contagious.
If such a contagious illness had been around for possibly 4-5 months, why within the space of under a month would things have gone from relatively normal in hospitals to new ones and extra mortuaries being constructed in a hurry.

My sister was ill in January and has been told by a doctor that they think she had it and has scarring on her lungs!

If someone in your family had it months ago, why didn’t the rest of your family have it too?

We know covid-19 is highly contagious. Surely more people would be hospitalised or dead, particularly as shield/vulnerable groups weren’t aware they were at risk months ago, so would have been living their normal lives - why didn’t more people catch it?

If your family member had it and went to work, education, church, etc - why didn’t anyone they were in close contact to also catch it? Surely these places would become an epicentre if it was actually covid-19?

In our trust we had a huge spike of pneumonia from late December onwards.
Much larger than usual winter pressures with younger patients

In fact our radiologists are now going through cxr and ct chests from December onwards to see if there was viral pneumonitis on those and comparing them to recent ones.

I've heard from ITU consultants too that they think it has been here a while.

The normal flu death rate for this winter was lower than average, how would that be if a deadly virus was present?

we'd have had unmistakable covid deaths way before we did if it had taken hold sooner

It doesn’t make sense that covid-19 was in the UK since November but we have only had serious cases at such a high volume within the last month.