Genuinely confused

[Lissy23]

I live in Yorkshire, I moved up here 6 years ago now.
My family and old friends all live in the south east, where rates have been extremely high with the new variant cases for weeks.

The reason I’m confused is that I don’t know anyone who has it from my hometown ... even though it’s been raging through like wildfire and I know the local hospital is saturated.

I know it’s probably only a matter of time, but I have a very big extended family and know lots of people there...but haven’t heard of a single person with it. My parents hardly go out , but they do go for a walk daily and my dad still shops at Tesco once a week for a big shop.
My uncle was going to watch the local football team until the tier 4 restrictions came in!
I was thinking maybe there’s a genetic element but that doesn’t make sense in terms of my friends not getting it.
One of my good friends is a nurse and she caught it during the first wave, very mildly. So that’s the only person, and that was back in April!

What is your point OP? Is this thinly disguised "covid is bullshit/lies" type post?

I only know one person who has had it and they live over 100 miles from me

(Central south)

No I do believe it’s real and I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But I thought this new variant was so contagious and I thought especially in that area of the south east that I’d know at least someone.

No one in my family had received a positive test up to Christmas Eve
Now I have family in intensive care
Sadly it’s a matter of time before someone on your family gets it
As for friends, many many people i know have had it. Nearly all of them now! I’m wondering when it’s my turn

@Realitea that’s what I’m thinking, it’s just a matter of time. But I know that they’ve been really bad in that particular area for many weeks now, seems odd to me that no one has got it. I know I should be grateful (I am), just feeling confused and worried.

I know fucking loads. Several people I know have had people die. Local pharmacy I go to had the head pharmacist die. Niece had had it, guy at work has has it. A couple of business contacts have had it. Neighbours of my brother all tested positive (one household) just after Christmas and one got carted off to hospital. In London

I live in a large town in the SE, I don’t know anyone who’s had it. Absolutely not a Covid sceptic at all, I think it’s just partly chance, and partly the fact I don’t know many people.

I live in a village in the North West and know 5 who have had it and another who has died.

I didn't know anyone close who'd had it until mid-Dec. Now I know loads, including immediate family. Thankfully no one more than mildly ill.

Weirdly, I seem to know more people who had it here in West Yorkshire a month or more ago, than I do in my hometown, which is one of the hot spots for the new variant and has been for weeks.

I live in an area that has had some of the lowest rates (was tier 2 a couple of weeks ago) I know 1 person who has died, 2 with long COVID, 1 who has been taken to hospital in the last couple of days and honestly lost count of how many I know who have had it.

Neither of our situations are really that surprising tbh.

Weirdly, I seem to know more people who had it here in West Yorkshire a month or more ago

Cross post

I live in Essex and since Christmas I have heard of so many people who have had it. Before that it was the odd few, now it seems to have literally exploded. I go shopping regularly, teach once a week and I haven't though.

@Jonahroo it’s Essex that my family live...and I still haven’t heard of anyone

I'm a big family. 5 step / siblings and 10 children between us all in different schools.

3 of us work in schools. Aside from the odd pupil, none of us know anyone who has had Covid.

One friend of Dad. That's it. We're all mid SE fully in the dread zone. I hope this lasts.

I had it over Xmas, i was very poorly.
First we didn't tell people because we weren't sure.
Self isolated, got tested.
Testing delayed due to Xmas
Got through quiet Xmas, didn't want to worry anyone.
Getting better now, but schools are shut, DH is wfh, I potter around, only two local friends know!
Everyone is so stressed, me telling old friends, work colleagues, relatives - what good would it do?

I thought this (most of my family and a lot of friends also live down south where rates are much higher) until a family member ended up hospitalised and on a ventilator. She's 21. Every day she would go out breaking lockdown rules, going to parties, meeting friends, going to others houses. It was only a matter of time. Please stay home, god forbid anyone more vulnerable catches the virus, it's very easily a death sentence.

Thinking about how bad it is in London and the South East right now and they think up to 1 in 30 who have it, that’s still 29 out of 30 who don’t. So it seems entirely plausible to me that you don’t know anyone with it.

Here’s the maths:
29/30 is the probability of any one person not currently having the vaccine. Put this number into your calculator, then raise it to the power of however many people you know. That’s the probability of none of them having had COVID.
It’s not perfect, as it’s not the probability of never having had it, just recently, and it doesn’t take into account clustering, but it should be able to tell you how freakily lucky you have been or not been.
Now bear in mind that even if you get a number like 0.000 000 1, or one in ten million, well, there are more than ten million people in the U.K., small chances are going to come up from time to time.
The other possibility, if the number is very low, is that the people you know aren’t acting as independent events. This is obviously true, they are all at the very least linked by knowing you. Some of them will live together. It’s also possible that they will have other things in common, like age, or type of profession, which make their risks lower than average.

You probably know more than you think. In my experience, most people aren't publicising the fact that they have /have had it.

I know quite a few people that have had it, but only because they have told me in person after the fact. I didn't hear anything about it from others or while they were self isolating.

None of my immediate family and friends have had a positive test but most of us had symptoms last spring before the tests were available so it's hard to say. One of my DD's has post viral symptoms including "covid toes" so think she must have been asymyomatic at some point around October. Just because you don't know anyone who has tested positive doesn't mean that they have not had it!

Bear in mind also that people might not be sharing the news that they have it. I know six families in my small town who currently have covid in the household, and none of them have been shouting it from the rooftops or talking about it on Facebook. So just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

As a couple of PPs have said, I am in London and also didn’t know anyone (even by association, not personally) who had had it until a week or so ago.

Then boom, loads of people.

Agree that not everyone is sharing that they have it either, for fear of being deemed ‘unclean’ or something.

There has been some research on natural immunity (also investigation into potential genetic immunity in some countries). Some work by (if I recall correctly) PHE in care homes showing that of those who had remained well throughout, about 50% showed an immune response, indicating that they had, at some point been exposed to a virus sufficiently similar to afford some protection.
It's possible that if your friends and family live in the same town and tend to use the same facilities /move in the same circles, they have had a previous infection in common.
Obviously I'm not saying this is the case, but it goes some way towards potentially explaining why only approximately 50% of household exposure to known cases go on to test positive themselves.