COVID in UK in Dec 2019

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news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-daughter-of-uk-man-who-died-from-covid-19-in-january-attacks-china-for-cover-up-12067060

The above is about an elderly man, who hadn't left the UK, became ill in December, and died in January. COVID has now been found in his lung tissue.

The assumption seems to he that he contracted COVID in the community, long before it was presumed to even be in the community. He seems to have passed it on to his granddaughter, who presumably would also have unknowingly transmitted it further in the community.

With chest film and faecal samples now putting COVID in Europe in Autumn 2019 - or even possibly as early as March 2019 - surely there are some pretty big questions that need to be asked and answered by the government?

@annabel85

Do we know excessive death figures for the period around Dec 19 to Feb 20?

I'd expect Covid to have been here sooner than the official first case, but it seems strange that it all just exploded in March (exponentially from first official case) in terms of cases and deaths and hospitals being overwhelmed.

Hospitals are always very busy in winter but if we had Covid spreading without restriction for months on end in addition to usual viruses and illness, then would people not have been dropping like flies and hospitals unable to cope, before March?

If you look at Spanish flu the first phase didn't cause as many deaths - it was the second wave that was deadly - ergo maybe the March and April cases were a second wave if the virus was here from November it would be a direct copy of the spanish flu pandemic I terms of timescale.

This doesn’t surprise me. We’ve been chatting on other threads about it being around for longer than thought.

The WHO are asking countries to go back and look at X-rays from last year. Wonder how we are getting on with that in this country?

I think it hit the younger, mobile population first, so business travellers, skiers etc. It took a while to get through to the older, high risk patients so death rate didn’t explode initially.

I also think (May be wrong) this was a low flu death rate year? So that could have covered up some earlier deaths. The death rate in general didn’t seem high to cause alarm.

I think we will see more evidence it was around earlier than thought. We are seeing this happen in other countries.

And if you read about the 84 year old who died at the end of Jan, the daughter first had symptoms 15th December. I think it’s too much of a coincidence to say she definitely didn’t have it and he just randomly caught it in hospital. If she had classic Covid symptoms then he came down with it, it’s much more likely he picked it up from her and he hadn’t travelled anywhere.

So it looks like it was in the community from mid December? To get in to the community it would have needed to arrive from travellers earlier than this date.

November not looking so unlikely...

That thread has everyone clearly talking about heavy congestion. IF (and it's a big if) many of them had covid, it was a different strain.

I believe the "evidence" that it was in Wuhan in August 2019, it's the wrong time of year for flu or anything not novel. Definitely France in December. Not in Spain in.March 2019, that was an error with contaminated samples. It looks most likely that it grew, slowly at first, in Europe from late Autumn. The actual numbers infected for that to be true would be small, thousands not tens of thousands, otherwise it would have grown more quickly.

I think we work in the same place palacegirl! I was off sick with a cough and high temp for a month in January. GP couldn't work.out what was wrong with me.

@Lisette1940

I think we work in the same place palacegirl! I was off sick with a cough and high temp for a month in January. GP couldn't work.out what was wrong with me.

Sheffield? It was definitely rife here whatever it was!

Ah no Aberdeen. Sorry palacegirl. Meaculpa. Sounded very similar. I've never been so sick. Brain fog everything.

I wouldnt be surprised.

I dont know if I have had I but I had a very unusual persistent dry cough in Feb. Never had anything like it before in my life. I was coughing for hours everyday and worse at night. At night I was going to bed with 2 + litres of liquid to drink to try and stop the coughing. Went on for 3-4 weeks.

I think it hit the younger, mobile population first, so business travellers, skiers etc. It took a while to get through to the older, high risk patients so death rate didn’t explode initially.

If it was around November/December and hit younger people first then the older population would have caught it in the Christmas season (especially family gatherings etc). It could well have happened but it wasn't really deadly here until well into March. Someone mentioned March/April could have been the second wave (or a stronger strain) which it could have been but we just don't know.

With regards to people suffering most of the symptoms before Christmas or in January then it could have been Covid but could just have been flu or a chest or viral infection. The Covid symptoms can just be the same. Those viruses are nasty in themselves. Even a bad cold can give you a fever/bad cough/loss of smell etc. I've been wiped out for weeks before now with the flu and a chest infection.

I was tested for the flu and a number of other viruses. That said there are many other viruses out there. The GPs seemed puzzled.

ChaChaCha is right, Mr. Attwood could have picked up the virus while in hospital 1-2 days before his death on 30 January. That would still be earlier than believed to be in UK, but not same as mid December.

even once we have a good vaccine against covid people will insist for years that their vaccine jab failed after they pick up any other fever/cough/anosmia bugs.

Well he was ill for weeks before that according to the report? Since Jan 7th and his daughter was ill from mid December.

To pick it up in hospital then die within two days would be the least likely scenario I suspect. Especially when we know average time from infection to death is 3 weeks. And that fits with his illness timeline.

@yeOldeTrout

ChaChaCha is right, Mr. Attwood could have picked up the virus while in hospital 1-2 days before his death on 30 January. That would still be earlier than believed to be in UK, but not same as mid December.

even once we have a good vaccine against covid people will insist for years that their vaccine jab failed after they pick up any other fever/cough/anosmia bugs.

So his daughter had the cough, which he then caught, was hospitalised with it and sadly died - but he probably caught it 2 days before he died? Highly highly unlikely.

Exactly @palacegirl77

Weirdly I was talking about this earlier today. I had a dreadful bug last year - didn't have a bad cough, but had pneumonia that didn't respond to antibiotics (thus viral) and a high temp (which was often masked because I was taking paracetamol for pleurisy at the time) and felt so ill that I could barely dress myself. It started around about this time last year and I was acutely ill between September and November but I still don't feel myself now. I've got something like a post viral fatigue thing, some days I'm breathless just going up the stairs and just feel exhausted.

Was talking to a friend about this earlier - she's a nurse, I'm a doctor - and if I'd had those sx this year then I would suspect Covid.

There was definitely something going around last autumn into winter.

I had symptoms in November which, had I had them a couple of months later would have been attributed to COVID- high temp, complete loss of smell and taste, terrible hacking cough which led my GP to prescribe a nebuliser which I have never had in the past and I am over 60. I felt wiped out for weeks. My DH had a milder version but later had COVID toes symptoms and needed emergency surgery for a blood clot , my DD had conjunctivitis and DGS had a mysterious rash. My GP was mystified but said she had many patients with a virus. I do wonder whether this started long before we were initially aware although not sure how it would change things.

Is it right tho that covid 19 is "a coronavirus" so they are, and have always been around but this is a more deadly version?
My DM died in 2011 of an unidentified virus with the main symptoms being a very high temperature and struggling to breath. She was put on a ventilator and died 2 weeks later. The virus or cause was never identified, but she had terminal cancer at the time so that was put down on the death certificate.

Me and DH were ill over Christmas. No snot or anything, awful cough, couldn’t move without doubling over coughing. Strangely the kids who normally get ill the worst had a high temp for half a day and then were absolutely fine with a small lingering cough for weeks. Took me and DH weeks of continually coughing to feel anywhere near better.

I think because children who normally are the ones hard hit by the flu/coughs and colds weren’t badly affected it took a while for people to catch on there was something around. If it started around November time I imagine people were busy with work/school etc and then when families got together at Christmas, went to visit granny and grandad in nursing homes for Christmas visits, etc etc it suddenly hit the older generation who were the ones that ended up in hospital and dieing which then fits in with them dieing end Feb/beginning March time.
Before then the healthy people who died were just put down to anomaly’s and those with underlying conditions (which was the majority) was put down to thier condition. My friends perfectly healthy partner was in hospital beginning of Feb with what was thought was pneumonia which looking back was probably Covid.

@annabel85

Do we know excessive death figures for the period around Dec 19 to Feb 20?

I'd expect Covid to have been here sooner than the official first case, but it seems strange that it all just exploded in March (exponentially from first official case) in terms of cases and deaths and hospitals being overwhelmed.

Hospitals are always very busy in winter but if we had Covid spreading without restriction for months on end in addition to usual viruses and illness, then would people not have been dropping like flies and hospitals unable to cope, before March?

Dec cases could have been the first wave. Historically second waves are deadlier. So maybe what we had in March was the second wave. We didn't know we'd had the first one as it wasn't as serious.

Is it possible that Covid was in the UK earlier than we think? Yes.

Is it the case that you and all your co-workers had it in November, because you all had that really nasty cough that was going round and you just couldn't shift it? No.

I had a very bad chest infection type illness over Christmas 2019. Attended A+E and was treated with steroids, nebulisers, etc etc. I was convinced it was Covid, but my work antibody test was negative. As were several other coworkers who had the same kind of illness.
So while it may have been in the UK, I also think there were some other really nasty viruses circulating at that time too.

I’ve read if you had the antibody test a few
months after being ill then they don’t show in all cases? So lots of people ill earlier in the year won’t show positive when the tests finally came available.

Agree there will always be other nasty viruses around. The evidence does keep mounting that this was here earlier than reported. But yes that doesn’t mean all the viral respiratory illnesses people had around Christmas were necessarily COVID.

My boss had something that I would guess to be Covid in January maybe? He was really ill with it. However, no one else in the office caught it, which is unusual. Normally one person gets a cold and then everyone else gets it as well. Oddly no one caught this. So I do wonder if the disease has somehow mutated which is causing either more people to catch it or more people to show symptoms?

I don’t think it’s surprising to find it was here before March.

The questions about why it was only noticed in March/why the deaths only went up in March and posts implying the Chinese were covering it up are bizarre - how can you know about a virus that you don't even realise exists?

Covid had to have been spreading from at least December onwards, just from pure basic logic, it's not possible for a disease to spread through almost the entire world in a matter of weeks, it's not physically possible. By the time it was noticed and tested for here, millions upon millions of people had it - hence the high number of deaths. As to why it wasn't noticed, who's going to notice a cough during winter? Loads of people will either have felt a bit ill and stayed home, then got better, or gone to their GP and been told they had a virus, to wait for it to go. Some people will have been hospitalised but they'll have been lost among the hundreds of other people in with other illnesses - for many elderly people with multiple illnesses, their cause of death isn't actually known - they just pass away and it's accepted that an illness got them, as it often does in that situation. So hundreds of vulnerable people could have died and their deaths attributed to old age. Pneumonia (which is often what covid leads to, and what actually causes death) is a massively common cause of death in older people. Unless there was someone there, watching every case, recording every COD, no one will have joined the dots. It was only when everything kicked off that testing started and it appeared that covid popped up out of nowhere, when it had in fact been spreading unnoticed for months.

I think what the pandemic has revealed is how little people know about viruses and about how medicine works - there seems to be a belief that doctors can and should know exactly what illness everyone has, exactly what causes death etc, when a lot of the time it's just guessing. If an elderly person with multiple illnesses passes away in a care home the doctor just certifies their death and that's it. As long as there isn't anything suspicious about the circumstances, there's no need to investigate what actually killed them, it's a waste of time, which is of course the reason why Harold Shipman was such a successful serial killer - he killed people whose cause of death would just be assumed from their illnesses. Equally, a GP will look at someone with a cough and as long as that person isn't struggling, just tell them to go home and wait for it to go. They're not going to think that person has a serious illness or think there's a pandemic with no reason - coughs are just a common symptom and normally nothing to worry about.