wondering if the start of the UK pandemic was earlier than officially disclosed?

[firthy85]

hello. just seen a zombie thread from 1 january last year with people talking about having this awful hacking cough, lethargy and vomiting. posters saying that they had been suffering with this virus since october/november 2019 but was just put down to a normal seasonal chest infection. when the media started to report that coronavirus had come to the UK and we saw the first cases wondering if any of the posters over on that other thread or in fact you, got a test when you started to hear about it?

I had 'flu' over Christmas 2019 which was like Whooping Cough (I had this in 2012). Not to mention a high temp. I'd had the flu jab.

Interesting! DH is convinced we all had it over Christmas 2019/2020. I had met a friend who was just back from China/Zhejiang province. I had this awful cold, an incredibly sore throat, went on and on. Then DH and DDs started a hacking cough which was so bad that they could barely breathe in between coughing. Lasted well into February. I guess we’ll never know.

I was on holiday in Spain end of October in 2019 (age 27 at the time)

I was in bed for 3 days straight with the most horrendous cough. It’s the most sick I’ve ever been. It was exactly what the Covid cough is like.

I went to the
Doctors 4 weeks later still coughing slightly and they brushed me off.

If there was ever a time I thought I had Covid it was then. I’m almost certain.

I was ill from January with a nasty cough which then floored me in february. I was coughing until May. I do wonder whether it was covid related, but I teated negative for antibodies in June

I was ill at the end of February 2020 with a terrible cough and high fever. It took a good few weeks to recover completely and my DH had to take time off work to look after me which has never happened before. Two of my DCs came down with it at the same time and were only off school for a day each. Ten children were off from DS4's class that day - all of us were at the same soft play birthday party the week before. One single person could easily have infected all of us at the same time.

My DH and I both had bad scolds that seemed to last all over Christmas and new year, however there were not thousands of people dying ( I realise PP have mentioned relations sadly dying, but not in the numbers we had in further waves) I would also query all those reporting scores of school children being struck down with awful colds/ flu. Would these be the same children that are allegedly not at risk of catching Covid?

I have thought this for a while as I was ill for ages around Nov 19 - January 20. It was like nothing I'd had before: a cough that I couldn't shake, plus I lost my sense of smell and taste. I wasn't really poorly, still went to work etc, but it went on for months. It went through all of us at work.
It could have been a virus, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Covid.

MIL almost certainly had it December 2019. Couldn't stop coughing, felt extremely ill, rushed to hospital, in ICU on a ventilator. They couldn't explain what was wrong with her. Amazingly she made a full recovery and has since been back to the hospital for unrelated reasons and been told by doctors that she was their unexplained miracle case, and that they think she almost certainly had Covid. She's 83 now and in pretty good health.

No I think there were a lot of chest infections around autumn/winter 2019 - multiple. I know a healthcare worker who had 3-4 that were bad enough to be in bed for a week each time. But they still got Covid in mid-March (i.e. no immunity from all the other chest infections the previous winter, so presumably they weren't Covid).

Hopefully mask-wearing in healthcare will continue so that healthcare workers don't spend every autumn and winter so bloody unwell.

I think it was around Nov/Dec 19. Out of my class only 7 children made it in for the Christmas show, they were all so ill, coughing etc. We ended up just doing an improvised Christmas sing song in the classroom.
Two local schools were shut, and the cleaners were spraying all the handles and high traffic areas with special antibacterial spray.

Lots of schools closed in late November 2019 due to illness, ours didn’t but had unusually high numbers off ill. One Head said it was a combination of norovirus and a flu like illness and he’d never seen so many off sick before.

DC’s high school had some kind of virus sweep through it December 2019. Then again after the February half term 2020 when some classes only had a handful of children in. Lots of teachers were off as well.

It’s a big high school, 1100 students, and since the first reopening in September 2020 not a single positive case, not a single bubble burst. Anecdotally, many of the teachers think it was Covid as it defies logic that there would be zero cases since September.

November 2019 I had to ha r a week off work with a horrible virus - I’m a teacher and always worked through colds before but this one wiped me out. I remember going back to work after a week and coughing just from waking up the stairs. I’m a runner and it took 2 months for me to get back out again. None of my family were ill. DH remarked months later whether it could have been a Covid but we’ll never know.

My DH had classic respiratory and abdominal symptoms of COVID at Xmas 2019. He was pretty ill, one night I thought I might have to call an ambulance.

It took him weeks to get better, and he is never ill. I have long been convinced he had COVID.

@halcyondays

Lots of schools closed in late November 2019 due to illness, ours didn’t but had unusually high numbers off ill. One Head said it was a combination of norovirus and a flu like illness and he’d never seen so many off sick before.

Yes we were told it was norovirus but we all commented at the time about how norovirus doesn't cause sore throats, coughs etc like all the kids and staff had. Was very weird. We had emails from the LA with advise from PHE. I was pregnant at the time and was a bit concerned being in school at the time when so many were ill.

I'm convinced Coronavirus was in the UK earlier than "patent zero" I was surprised and how vehemently I was shot down when I suggested this a year ago.

There is a man local (very academic) to me who had modelled the spread of the virus and he thinks it was in the UK at least in mid November.

There was definitely something very similar to Covid 19 (or Covid 19) going around the UK in December 2019. Did the death rate rise much in January/February 2020 or just in April?

Interesting podcast by one of the doctor brothers on I player called Jump. Talked about covid probably did not originate in the wet markets in China but that was probably a ‘super spreader event’ where loads caught it. I think he may have called it something else. Makes sense I suppose.

DH was really Ill from around the 20th December 2019
He hadn’t been abroad but worked in a large multicultural city and I suppose he could have picked up Covid in Chinatown or similar
He was poorly for almost a month and his lungs took ages to recover. I had a milder version that I caught from him
He is convinced it was Covid and I have never seen him so Ill but it could have just been flu

@Hoppinggreen same here for DH. He was working and mixing freely in Manchester City centre in a venue frequented by many transient multi cultural visitors, including from China and the Far East

There was a lot of flu like chest infections going round our school December 2019. We cancelled Christmas 2019 as my parents and my sister’s family were both really ill with the chest infection / flu thing going round. My parents were in bed for about a week as they were so ill. We came down with it the day after Boxing Day, my ds (asthmatic) was so ill he was admitted to the paediatric ward overnight while they gave him steroids. He missed the first two weeks back to school in January as he was so ill and took so long to recover.

I remember seeing a graph showing the high levels of respiratory infections in schools compared to other years. Can’t find it but found some figures for winter 2019, there were definitely more infections in care homes and schools before Christmas.

I remember a thread on here talking about how a poster had to take her dc to A&E and one of the nurses had commented on how many respiratory presentations they’d been having but not linked to any of the flu’s going round. I didn’t comment on it so have very little chance of finding it now, but that was around October/November I think.

I’d love to re-read it now and see if my memory is correct and what the comments were.

My dad was ill Christmas 2019 and struggled breathe at times. Doctors said it was a virus going around. For ages after he complained he couldn't smell or taste anything. The rest of us had coughs and colds

@LynetteScavo

There was definitely something very similar to Covid 19 (or Covid 19) going around the UK in December 2019. Did the death rate rise much in January/February 2020 or just in April?

There was a brief rise, but it co-includes with the flu surge we had at the end of Dec/Jan from the flu surveillance reports, IIRC. Overall deaths were under the 5 year average last winter and were expected to stay that way all year.

I did have that hacking cough that went on for weeks with more than one course of steroids, as did a lot of people in my department at work. Being in a hospital though anyone who caught it from Jan/Feb onwards was tested and they all came back negative. None of us had antibodies either. There was definitely something with an awful cough circulating that wasn’t covid that winter, possibly a different corona virus.

There's been a lot of speculation - even before "the French case" I had people saying to me they'd had it in January because "it was a really bad cold like thing...."

Thing is, since that report (May 2020) there's been no other "sightings" of earlier cases. There was a scheme to test sewage water samples after some one sample from 2019 tested +ve, but no others ever came to light.

The simplest explanation for these events is contamination. If there'd been more cases, by now A LOT more evidence would have come to light. That's notwithstanding the fact that if the epidemic had started sooner, this would have been obvious in data - it's not, ergo it didn't happen.