Am i being thick?If the first reported uk case was on jan 31st then it was here from dec/early jan then?

[Wankerchief]

Ive just read that the first confirmed case was on the 31st of jan (wiki and news sites)
Going on the two/three week incubation does that mean there was many people in Late Dec/early Jan that had it but had. No symptoms or just thought they had flu?

Dp says no but i cannot see how it cant of been here then but I've got nothing to me up

Bah, appalling mistakes above

Depends if the first person had just flown in from eg Wuhan.

Well many people did and they (if infected) would of been spreading it To many people daily no?

They might have been, but if you are going from the first confirmed case, that’s the only one you have concrete evidence of. So you can trace that back if possible to answer your question. Other than that it’s just conjecture.

France has confirmed it was definitely there in December. Personally I think we're currently in the 2nd wave and first was was in Dec but we didn't know.

In Dec half DD's school was off with a dry cough, fever and pneumonia like illness. They literally almost closed the school.

I think the man you are talking about contracted it in Singapore.

But you might find this article interesting.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52589449

First confirmed case was two travellers who had flown in from China, so not community transmission. So far as can be told, they didn't transmit the virus to anyone - although with the lack of testing then who knows.

Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't happening elsewhere.

That link to the choir Is very interesting.
Its all so odd. I work in retail And so many people were off with a cough/fatigue mid jan But i guess we will never know.
Dp is saying that the deaths dont tally but if they were not looking for corona Then it could of been listed As flu or something

Bah am i in tinfoil hat territory?

In early December schools in my town closed for deep cleans due to norovirus or winter vomiting bug. Different symptoms than Covid

There was quite a nasty respiratory virus going around late last year/early this year.

But I'd be inclined to agree with your DH - the deaths don't tally, and the death rate for that period was actually lower than usual.

Don't get me wrong, I suspect that the 31 January case wasn't the first, just the first discovered, but I don't think it was present in significant numbers prior to that.

I don’t know, but last Dec I knew of 3 people with pneumonia. All at the same time, not linked or in the same area. 2 were in ICU. Both are young.

I was toying with the idea that maybe we were in a second wave earlier in lockdown but given the sheer number of deaths over the past two months I think it’s highly unlikely. The graphs I’ve seen from ONS statistics show a really steep climb in all deaths from mid-March so it’s not like we wouldn’t have noticed far more deaths than expected.

It would be a very far reaching theory to justify it only circulating in groups that aren’t particularly vulnerable.

Very interesting, I also work in retail and so many of us were very ill in December/January, one friend was hospitalised with apparant pneumonia.
Im convinced we've all had it.

Im convinced it was here and quite well spread by January

My DM was incredibly ill in December with a cough and pneumonia type symptoms with a fever that lasted a fortnight. I've never seen her so ill. Shortly after that my exh was was exactly the same. I would 100% say this was a more covid type illness than flu. Of course we can't say for sure, but they both ticked every box for covid.

I think the first community transmission case (confirmed, at least) was counted as the "first". There was some returning traveller cases prior to then.
I am in no doubt it was "here" before- if it was in France, then it was here for sure.

I would love to think the virus was upon us much earlier, and went largely unnoticed for a while, and is in fact less deadly than we thought, and a lot of us would now be immune, etc.

But I agree with others it doesn't really add up with the huge number of extra deaths from March onwards (also, all antibody studies so far suggest only a small fraction of the population was exposed?)

There is still a lot we don't know/understand about this virus, though. The truth may be more subtle (Maybe there was less lethal early strain in December. Maybe only a small fraction of infected people develop antibodies, or maybe these antibodies fade away very quickly). But raw numbers so far don't look good, one way or another.

My DD had a pneumonia type illness in late November. Fever, cough that lasted for ages, difficulty breathing.

But I am fairly sure it was a pneumonia-type illness. Not COVID. So many viruses have very similar symptoms, which is why they are testing. If the symptoms were THAT different, they wouldn't need to test...

First confirmed case was two travellers who had flown in from China, so not community transmission.

They think now that this was the first community transmission in the UK, but it was quickly contained.

A student at York university was visited by his mum, who had come from Wuhan. She already had it and gave it to her son while in York.

Most of the early cases in the UK came via people returning from holiday in northern Italy

The virus was not here last year because it would have been noticed earlier if it had been

@Lumene I agree there

@Zaphodsotherhead that's interesting yes - would she be willing to have an antibodies test when available to see if it was? Would you come back and tell us if it's the case?

Surely the theory of viral load means time could have amped up how ill people would get, like an avalanche effect?

My relative flew in from Spain mid Jan and was very ill, saw consultants etc with no answers, Not one mentioned CoVID. Investigations stopped at lockdown by which time he was feeling much better anyway. Relative ok now apart from fatigue and consultant rang recently to check up on him as services are resuming. When he listened to the whole list of symptoms from the start and not just the resulting throat damage he was investigating he said "you've had Covid". Why did no one think of that at the time??? Crazy.

Yes, it quite probably was... but some people are far too eager to extrapolate that it was widespread in January, when deaths only started rocketing from late March (see chart below).

fullfact.org/media/uploads/UK_spike_chart.png

The only possible ways this can be explained are:

a) Covid was either not present, or only present in very low numbers in January (which isn’t consistent with office blocks being struck down with it - but just working through it - as per other threads) , and any flu-like illnesses over that period were the flu - as happens every winter!

b) A precursor to the current Covid virus was present but somehow mutated in March to a much more dangerous illness... In which case the illness people had in January wasn’t really the same at all (in the same way I couldn’t really say I had “Spanish Flu” in 1917, a year before that pandemic).... but i’ve not seen a shred of evidence that this occurred.

c) the Government, along with all other world Governments, even those that are a loggerheads (USA, Iran, Russia, Germany etc.) have all colluded to falsify death statistics to artificially reduce them in January and increase them dramatically in March.

Of these, a) is overwhelmingly more likely to be the case

If this is the second wave and the first wave was in December/January then that would fit with the deaths we are having now.

The second wave is usually worse than the first