It MIGHT have been here before Feb/March

[Whattodowhattodooo]

Just seen this tweet.

**A French Doctor has claimed that the virus was in France in December, a month before the first confirmed case.

Dr Cohen tested old blood samples for patients with respiratory symptoms and found a positive result.

This is worth investigating - it could be significant. - Prof Karol Sikora

Whilst it's France and not UK, I think the possibility should be investigated over here too. I am 99% sure my Dad had it beginning of January.

It was very likely to be in the UK since December if not before

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/french-hospital-discovers-covid-19-case-december-retested

For those questioning why more people weren't infected or the fatality rates didn't go up in Nov/Dec, just like in Wuhan, at the beginning of any virus the R0 rate is low.

Also remember that the people infected, like now, may have experienced the milder symptoms so potentially went unnoticed.

I have suffered from asthma since childhood but its managed. At the end of November, I had the worst bout of breathing problems, a high temp, cough and fatigue to the point I almost begged OH to take me in to hospital. I ended up on steroids and antibiotics.
Within 3 weeks, my sister had the same symptoms yet my mum had just the temp and one of the rashes now recognised as a COVID symptom (she's immunocompromised so we've been lucky).

I guess until we get the antibody tests its anyones guess but living in London, working at Imperial College (high number of chinese and international students), the chances of it being around in November wouldnt be as low as some would think.

No, this is rubbish and just people looking for a bit of added spice to an already bad situation.

All of you who are sure you had it because you had the worst cold of your life. You most likely had a cold. A bad one. It was winter!

Are we really to believe all those people had it but nobody died of it until April? That’s a coincidence. Not one account of somebody dying from a mysterious cough in January?

@SpokeTooSoon

Is it so hard to belive that it mutated?
Spanish flu did
Coronaviruses are known for mutating and becoming more deadly

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-more-than-30-strains-say-scientists-in-china-11976380

www.newscientist.com/article/2236544-coronavirus-are-there-two-strains-and-is-one-more-deadly/

@SpokeTooSoon

All of you who are sure you had it because you had the worst cold of your life. You most likely had a cold. A bad one. It was winter!

After travelling and close contact with a very sick Chinese person (who lived in China). A cold bad enough to hospitalise me for a week, with high temperature, dry cough and respiratory issues. Bad enough that they isolated me and took multiple blood samples? It definitely wasn’t flu, they tested for that.

After I was out a family member was in hospital on oxygen with similar (in January).

Is it possible it has been here longer and actually we've overestimated the death rate which is why we haven't seen more deaths until more prolonged spread?

@Futurenostalgia
So if it was common in UK in ... (what are some of you saying now, October 2019?) then most if not all of these must be true:

PHE surveillance is truly crap; they caught the E.Coli contamination in rocket leaves a few summers ago but they can't tell influenza apart from other respiratory illnesses. Same for public health bodies all over Europe.

Infection control in hospitals is rubbish, they didn't know what their patients were very ill with

The r0 is below 1.2 (or)

The change in r0 is bizarre & unknown elsewhere in Nature; basically only around 1.0 for 3-4 months when it accelerated to a stable 2.5ish. Not S-shaped increase like every other r0.

huge % of popn have already had covid

the true death rate is well below 0.8% (and lockdown was totally unnecessary)

2019-20 flu season was super exceptionally mild so masked the covid19 deaths (ie, flu season very more exceptionally mild than believed)

testing for flu among those thought to have died in 2019-20 of flu -- was always wrong, or everyone with covid19 then also had flu so 'hid' the cases (every suspected flu death in hospital is tested to confirm)

My local critical care bed demand falling to 60% of long term avg in January 2020 was just an amazing exception to the bigger national trend of decline in need for CC beds

The 80-90% of people with matching symptoms testing recently negtive for covid -- that doesn't mean that lots of illnesses are similar, it's just coincidence so many with matching symptoms test negative nowadays

How covid has spread in every other country must be the same; hidden with snail's pace growing r0 until it exploded but then instantly plateaued (defying the S-shaped curve)

SARS-COV-2 does not have a stable genome; in fact, maybe everything we think we know about enveloped viruses is untrue, may as well insist on that, too.

Chuck out the understood median 5 d incubation period while you're at it. That would help the 'been here since November' theorists. You should go for a good 50+ day incubation period, I recommend. And decide everyone is highly infectious for 30+ days before showing symptoms - that helps the magic thinking, too.

The French don't have form for producing some terrible claims (remember the ibruprofen scare?)

So, Basically, just about everything we think we know about covid must be untrue if it was in Europe by mid Autumn 2019. Do people like thinking they have had the special disease, especially since many of us know no one who has had it and yet everyone is talking about it.

• Rhetorical Q from an actual infectious disease epidemiologist now leaving thread, because Misinformation Winds Me Up

More than London with Heathrow Airport, many more unis and a large Chinese community?!

This is an interesting discussion.

Nobody knows how many people are infected or how many have antibodies at the moment, thanks to problems with testing.

Maybe checking of start dates to terms, variations in lodgings/residence (single family home vs student halls) between London and the SW, even delegates or attendees of special events in certain areas could yield dots to join?

Examples of special events include pretty obscure conferences:
tibet.net/the-2nd-climate-action-for-tibet-panel-discussion-held-in-spain/
7 December 2019

www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/global-china-institute-centre-for-applied-linguistics-university-college-london-china-media-centre-of-the-university-of-westminster-uk-27858069933
Global China Institute; Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London; China Media Centre of the University of Westminster, UK
Friday, 6 December 2019 - The Sixth Global China Dialogue; two events, one free, one £194 per ticket. Held at the British Academy.

I know a Scottish academic who attended this and got the worst flu of his life.

I went to a London museum between Christmas and new year and became very ill for weeks

My parents then had it and one developed pneumonia
A friend I bumped into ended up with pneumonia

I would not be surprised

Husband also followed my illness with about 5 weeks of struggling to breath and chest pains but it didn’t get worse than that strangely

If you think corona virus feels like flu then you haven't had corona virus. It's like nothing I've ever experienced.

'All models are wrong but some are useful'.

The assumptions on which they depend may be considerably off. Or they may be spot on. We don't know which at this time.

When it comes to covid 19, some people get the full whack, some get milder symptoms. Some get no symptoms at all but can still spread it.

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, adenovirus? I caught this in December 2018, and, again in September 2019. Horrendous little critter it is

And this is why I think the peak we have just had is the 2nd wave that has been spoken about.

I do not understand if it was here in December why we only now have the spike in deaths?

Math,

You fit assumptions to curves.

The basic model used is the SIRS model (susceptible, infectious, removed (either recovered or dead, the maths does not care)).

As there are a few assumptions (infectivity, incubation period, CFR etc) it is possible to fit our data with more than one set of assumptions reasonably well, given that the only reasonably accurate pieces of data we have are deaths and hospital admissions.

The main argument being had is that you can fit a lower CFR (and hospital admissions rate) and a higher infectivity to the same curve as a higher CFR and lower infectivity (this is the crux of the Imperial vs Oxford group disagreement; even this is overhyped in the media though as the Oxford group accepted that the lower CFR, higher infectivity was a possibility, not a fact).

Importantly, though, whichever set of assumptions you choose, the evolution over time at the start of the epidemic (before herd immunity develops) will look the same. So hospital admissions and deaths will grow on the same predicted curves (as the numerator and denominator will both adjust, leading to the same fraction).

The only way the OP’s hypothesis can be true is if the disease itself radically changed between December and March, for which there is zero real evidence. In fact the shape of the virus makes it unlikely to undergo rapid mutations (and it has not) and basic evolution tends to make viruses that do mutate more infectious and less lethal over time, not the reverse.

So you either go with anecdote plus a bizarre, highly unlikely hypothesis or you think scientifically and use Occam’s razor to believe the 99.9% hypothesis is correct, until you see evidence to the contrary, as opposed to the 0.1% hypothesis based on anecdote posted on social media by a by-and-large (with several notable exceptions) scientifically illiterate population.

For those interested in how epidemics are modelled, the below link is good:

www.mtholyoke.edu/~ahoyerle/math333/ThreeBasicModels.pdf

What do people think there is a huge conspiracy that thousands more have died and their families, friends, doctors, nurses, coroners, hospital have been silenced

We think they simply didnt notice and thought it was what they were told "a viral illness".

Anecdotally, a number of people were told by hospital and GP staff that they were seeing a lot of a nasty virus with cough/pneumonia last year. So it flew under the radar as "golly, this is odd, next patient...".

There were also some large scarlet fever outbreaks amongst UK kids last year. The symptoms of scarlet fever (e.g. fever, body rash, sore throat) are very similar to symptoms of coronavirus in children.

Statistically, if could easily have flown under the radar by being included in various other statistical buckets and also by being mild enough initially that GPs and 111 were consulted but few young people ended up in hospital.

What ever happened to that vaping pneumonia all those young people were hospitalised with mid-last year?

I think many people would really like the nasty viruses that we/family members had and recovered from this winter to have been covid, in the hope that we / they won’t now get it. Understandable, but seems unlikely.

basic evolution tends to make viruses that do mutate more infectious and less lethal over time, not the reverse.

Unless it has a long incubation period, during which the host may already be infectious. Then there is no evolutionary pressure to become less infectious and chance takes precedence.

*less deadly

The only way the OP’s hypothesis can be true is if the disease itself radically changed between December and March
For all that fascinating scientific explanation:
(a) "scientists" originally modelled 500,000 deaths in the UK using "a" model adopted by the government. I am sure everyone, even the scientifically illiterate, can recall the headlines. There were other models that the government didn't use. They predicted much different numbers. Ones closer to the actual figures.

Expert scientists at Oxford and elsewhere had questioned the "it arrived in January / February" model being put by some scientists as being unlikely nearly two months ago. It's now turns out that those questions were valid. Scientists don't always get it right; and scientists rarely agree on something anyway. IT is the nature of science that experts are not always right.

(b) the OP did not propose a hypothesis. They reported a fact. The two things are quite different you know. Doctors in France have now identified a citizen who had the infection in late December. The problem in every country, including China, is that when people present with flu symptoms, and show every sign of having flu, doctors don't tend to go looking for a strange, previously undiscovered virus that happens to look and act like flu. The vast majority of people who have flu don't end up in hospital, they don't get tested for flu, and many don't even seek medical advice. So there is no way of disaggregating what might have been flu from what might have been Covid-19 in periods previous to testing. Now, in hindsight, some doctors are able to test some people who may have had or died from complications of flu earlier and are finding that they actually had Covid-19. It will never be possible to ascertain the exact time that the disease started circulating because we cannot turn back the clock and start testing everyone who had flu in the period of time before Christmas. And it wouldn't help if we could, because without specimens taken at the time, and preserved, all tests now could tell us is that someone has had the disease and not when. Such specimens are not routinely taken and preserved for the vast majority of flu cases.

People who like to spout "science babble" at the "scientifically illiterate" to self-justify their own importance and expertise need to remember that (a) not everyone is as stupid or inexpert as they think and (b) history is littered with the evidence of how often "experts" and "scientists" have got it wrong. Crystal ball gazing is still crystal ball gazing even if you dress it up in scientific language. It might be a best guess based on lots of factors, but it's still a guess. That guess, in terms of when the disease started to circulate, is now coming under heavy scrutiny, and evidence is emerging that the original best guess - only made weeks ago - was in error. Go figure. Experts got it wrong....

This is totally and completely untrue. 1. Deaths before march/April we're LOWER than average

1. The NHS would have been overwhelmed with cases back in January if that is what you had
2. It completely disproves all of the charts the scientific advisors and experts have been coming up with
3. It's just ridiculous, fair enough to have thought this a couple of months ago, but now? Having seen the impact that a relatively small number of people getting this virus has on the NHS and the rest of the country? You really think it spread completely undetected by statistics months ago???? Madness

That would mean a high number of medics wouldn’t have being doing their job properly

The information on how a patient is presenting, their symptoms, change in symptoms, medication, change of medication, every single treatment they receive is documented this data is collected and this data is constantly monitored (once use is for the upkeep of medication supplies)

So even if many medics had not noticed or thought it was a bit odd and had failed to mention in the various meetings they have with colleagues and management to discuss such issues the data would have picked up the patterns

And where do you get these statistics from of people that have flown under the radar ?

Is it possible it has been here longer and actually we've overestimated the death rate which is why we haven't seen more deaths until more prolonged spread?

But 99.99%+ of the deaths have come since mid-March. Unless there is the mother of all worldwide conspiracies, the unprecedented sharp rise in deaths shown by affected countries death rates is consistent with this. If 99.99% of deaths occurred since mid-March, it follows that Covid was only minimally present in the UK before March. Yes, it was here in January, and possibly even December, but in very, very low numbers in proportion to the population.