The outbreak may have started in September

[curlyrebel]

Anyone read this? www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-wuhan-1498566
Researchers at Cambridge University believe it may have started as early as mid-September and possibly didn't originate in Wuhan.

This to me is very likely as my DH and DD were ill for weeks back in October. DH thought he had pneumonia and complained about not being able to taste anything. They'd caught it after a visit to family in the US. My nephew there had this illness and was treated for pneumonia.

@curlyrebel

So it was here back in October, but we have only seen a spike in deaths since mid-March . Makes no sense at all.

I had really nasty flu and cough back in 2003... Must have been Coronavirus - it’s been circulating for years!

Every time someone posts this I wonder why there wasn't a huge hospital influx. It can't be true

I'm not sure about this.

How long do pandemics usually take to get to this level of deaths?

I think it's been here a couple of months maybe not from September.

Thing is nobody can trust China so we will never really know when they knew this virus was kicking off.

However we’ve only recently started seeing deaths from it so it’s unlikely it was here as far back as September

But how, when we're only seeing a spike in deaths now?

No this is absolute and complete nonsense. Covid deaths are unmistakable in nature and they would have been recognised as odd and new and spiking everywhere a lot sooner if this were true.

I suppose it’s possible that the number of cases was so low at that time that the resulting deaths were just absorbed into the yearly ‘flu figures.

It could also be possible that the ‘A’ type they talk about circulating at that point didn’t have the same effect on the lungs...

“But how, when we're only seeing a spike in deaths now?”

The nature of exponential growth. It could have been circulating for weeks/months at low-flattish levels, before reaching a critical mass point and suddenly reaching its upward growth stage on the graphs.

Late last year, doctors and scientists didn’t even know it existed, so they weren’t aware there was “something” they needed to look out for. They might have noticed a few more odd cases of pneumonia, but at the level of individual doctors/clinics that can be put down to randomness, until numbers start picking up a bit more and they start to see more cases that don’t fit the typical pattern.

Exponential growth does not mean circulate at low levels and then suddenly take off after a few months of none-exponential growth!

I reckon about December it's been here from

I work in a hospital and we did actually have have a lot of unexplained cases of pneumonia this winter where they couldn’t find the pathogen responsible.

That's my thinking @flatoutpanic

That's interesting @Redpurplegreen

We would have seen spikes in viral pneumonia in hospitals before we even knew it was this particular virus. We would have seen an increase in patients requiring intubations. The doctors would have been flooded by people who couldn't breathe, it would have been assumed to be the flu and recorded as a spike in the sentinel gp surgeries. Someone would have put it together when the news came out of Wuhan. None of this happened. It might have been somewhere else prior to Wuhan I suppose but it wasn't here.

Don’t be so silly. Even if it did originate as early as September, it certainly wasn’t in the UK then or in October/November/December.

You may have been ill, but you didn’t have Coronavirus.

The nature of exponential growth. It could have been circulating for weeks/months at low-flattish levels, before reaching a critical mass point and suddenly reaching its upward growth stage on the graphs.

No.... Exponential growth is not consistent with months of very little and the sudden and huge increase over a few weeks we have seen.

It could also be possible that the ‘A’ type they talk about circulating at that point didn’t have the same effect on the lungs...

So basically a very different illness symptomatically, even if similar genetically, so disingenuous to say that this outbreak started in September!

I agree with @Redpurplegreen

It was here from Dec at least .. but medics etc had little knowledge/awareness ... then around 24 th Jan ... NHS were starting to see the patterns / issues ..unexplained illness etc ...

And now here we are ...

I think this is perfectly possible epidemiologicaly speaking actually. Even this virus slowly mutates in the background and changes and it is possible is started off less able to infect people/be transmitted and so individual cases weren't noticed as particular spikes. There are also lots of asymptomatic people living in the same house as people who have tested positive so that could have been a factor. I also remember a spate of nasty unexplained
pneumonias and lung injuries in the US at the back end of last year that even Trump was taking about, putting it down to vaping.

The only thing that doesn't fit with that as a possibility is the numbers in China compared to Europe and the US. They show an epidemic starting from one or 2 cases whereas we have bigger numbers because Europe had a standing start with influx of lots of infected people at a time due to global travel. That's assuming the Chinese low numbers of infected/deaths are correct though.

I did think it could have been around since before Christmas too. My son had an awful flu type bug that totally wiped him out. He had a spiking temp for well over a week. He couldn’t taste anything, lost his appetite for about 3 weeks and just wanted to sleep. Also had a dry cough. His school was shut down for 2 days at the time for a deep clean as a lot of kids went down with this bug over the course of a couple of weeks.
He still has a bit of a dry cough going on now, months later. Other than that though he has remained pretty well since recovering.

@louloubelx
My daughter had EXACTLY the same thing as your son in February. Word for word. I never took her to the doctors, as she just wanted to sleep, so at the time just assumed it was flu. Another kid in her class was off at the same time; his parent did take him to doctors - diagnosed pneumonia.

If the idea that low Vit D increases the severity of the virus is true, this would also be another explanation of why death and even infection rates didn't spike immediately.

In sept/oct Vit D levels in the population would be at their highest, and so the effects on lungs wouldn't have been as extreme.

If you read the article, there is nothing to suggest it would have been here that early. The suggestion is the original form started elsewhere in China, then mutated and started to spread in Wuhan. The type of virus seen in Europe is another mutation. If the original form had been here in September surely that would be within the population rather than newer form.

The research is not saying that it has been spreading in the UK since September.

Strain A is the virus found in bats. That then mutated into strain B, which mutated in to strain C.

Strain B is more common than strain A in Wuhan so they have hypothesised from the earliest tests taken that the first cases may have been 500 miles away in Guandong where most of the cases were strain A or, at least, somewhere other than Wuhan.

If the virus mutated at a constant rate, it is possible that strain A first started circulating in September IN CHINA based on when strains B and C emerged. That is a very big if though.

The only cases of strain A found in the UK were the first 2 cases in York (a student and parent from China). Strain B, the type most common in the UK, was first detected in China in late December. Therefore coronavirus cannot have been widely circulating in the UK months before that.

The Oxford study that suggested 50% of the UK could have been infected and first cases could have been as early as January in the UK if assumptions about the mortality rate, R0 etc made in other models were incorrect (we can only estimate these based on observations/data). That was very much a theoretical model that was about pointing out that we could be getting the models very wrong as we are basing it on assumptions made from very little data so we need widespread testing.

Given that the hypothetical Oxford model was based on a lower R0 (how infectious the virus is), a lower mortality rate, and higher percentage of asymptomatic cases than current data is suggesting (all things that would increase the time taken to reach the current levels), and that there are no cases of strain A in the UK, it seems unlikely that that coronavirus was here before January at the earliest.