As suspected, COVID had already spread outside China at least as early as December
The French have made a discovery:
A French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.
Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu.
The patient was apparently originally assumed to have had pneumonia. But he actually had COVID, way back in December, and he hadn’t recently been to China, either. Nor had anyone in his family, although his wife (who never showed symptoms and who I don’t think has yet been tested for antibodies) “worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin, Cohen said. It was not clear whether those colleagues had travelled to China, and the local health authority should investigate, he said.”
The old samples from the other 23 people tested were not found to have COVID.
It is suspected that COVID may have also been present in the US in late December.
When a novel virus first appears, what causes it to come to attention? A change in patterns or a change in symptoms and patterns. COVID-19 didn’t initially represent much of a change, certainly not in this country, and perhaps not even in China, at the very outset (which is speculated to have been in November of 2019). The reason for that is that, until the numbers of cases started to accumulate, indicating a change in pattern, the symptoms of COVID are not very different from the symptoms of people who die of pneumonia and/or flu complications that are often diagnosed as pneumonia or ARDS. They are also not that different from the way people who died of H1N1 expired, and H1N1 is a variant of flu. Also, the population COVID affects most severely in terms of age and/or pre-existing conditions is very very similar to the group killed by seasonal flu and/or pneumonia and/or ARDS. Although flu and pneumonia kill more people under 5 than COVID appears to, that would not necessarily be noticed at the outset of the epidemic either, because that younger group would still be succumbing to the regular flu.
Because of Chinese obfuscation, however, it’s hard to reconstruct a good timeline and understand at what point the Chinese realized what was actually happening. Here’s a timeline that I doubt is completely correct, but it does mention that on December 31, the Chinese told WHO about “a cluster of 41 patients with a mysterious pneumonia.”
I’m going to assume that represents something like what happened. It stands to reason that it took a change of pattern, a sudden explosion of deaths in Wuhan to get the attention of Chinese health authorities and then later of the world. About a week after that, on January 7 (according to the timeline), COVID-19’s novel virus was identified, probably from samples from this cluster of 41.
Because the Chinese were actively covering up, however, instead of being open and honest, even after that there was a delay in knowledge about the virus and a delay in blocking international travel to and from China. So two things were operating. The first is that the virus probably began to spread before even the Chinese authorities were truly aware of the scope of what they were dealing with internally. The second is that once they became aware, and understood the dangers COVID presented to the world, they did all they could to keep that knowledge secret.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 got a silent toehold in many countries around the globe.
As so many have already said: what does it say that this thing was loose for weeks and months before … and no one noticed?
JimNorCal:
I don’t think it says very much.
Unless an illness represents a change in symptoms, it won’t be noted till it reaches critical mass. And an illness has to be VERY lethal to reach critical mass early.
COVID’s symptoms are mostly similar to the diseases I mention in the post. It is somewhat more lethal, but not incredibly more lethal. So the fact that it wasn’t noticed at first tells us what we already know.
A “retired” (frequently works on a part-time basis because he gets bored) infectious disease doctor that my wife occasionally works with (who has studied in China on a doctor exchange) theorized back in January that it was likely out there and doing its thing for a while. He got laughed at by GPs and ED docs thirty years his junior.
His theory was this: for the most part, when someone gets a severe cold or respiratory virus the procedure is: test for flu. If flu, treat as flu and record. If test for flu is negative, treat as a virus. That means sending people home to rest, OTC self-medicate and ride it out. And don’t record.
Until enough people died from it, in a geographic location where people are more aware of the prospect of emerging SARS-like diseases, its going to be flying under the radar for a while. Especially if it causes the very illness that takes so many older people.
It made some sense to me at the time but I am not a doctor or a scientist. And we had plenty of doctors saying that it wasn’t plausible.
Fractal Rabbit:
Doctors are not even required to test for flu, and they very often don’t. I wrote about this in at least one post and maybe two; don’t have time to find them at the moment.
My daughter and her husband had a nasty case of “flu” in February, in Florida. They went to Urgent Care, which was out of flu tests, so they were given Tamiflu and sent on their way. The husband got better quickly; my daughter got pneumonia the following week. (Treated outpatient, okay.) Their toddler did not get it. They are going to request a test for COVID antibodies. It’s possible.
Right now, almost no one is dying of the flu… or other conditions… they are being marked down as covid for the bonus $$$
Artfldgr,
If you subsidize something you get more of it. If hospitals were paid less for corona virus cases then magically cases of the flu, heart attacks, accidents would be skyrocketing now.
This similar to AIDS with the first case occurring in the mid-60s. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rayford
One theory is that AIDS jumped into the human species many times but died off. It took hold in the 80s because it spread rapidly through the gay community.
“Doctors are not even required to test for flu, and they very often don’t. ” – Neo
It would seem to me that a national Center for Disease Control and Prevention would be interested in having stats on how many people have flu or virus infections as a matter of course, whether fatal cases or not.
Maybe now they will start mandating tests on everyone for everything all the time.
Rank speculation I know, but a 65 year old neighbor of mine got “the flu” or whatever in late November. She succumbed so quickly it was unreal and nothing like I’d ever heard of before. I can’t help but wonder….
Neo,
I know they aren’t required to test for the flu. But here (NYS), during flu season, it seems to be SOP unless they’ve run out of tests.
But if many don’t, because they aren’t required to do so, that only makes the possibility, to my mind, of Wuhan Pox being around much sooner more plausible.
For the bibliophiles among us — which one of you did this?
https://preview.redd.it/qk4t4vt4wdu41.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=9474baa65f14b13e5a6232484272abb9e31f8c27
I thought non COVID-19 cases were not going to hospital? I hope the patient recovers anyway, although progressives are sweating bullets right now. Chill out Monatge, she is immortal.
https://newsthud.com/breaking-supreme-court-says-justice-ginsburg-hospitalized-with-an-infection/
I can’t even.
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/496279-fauci-was-model-for-hero-in-romance-novel-by-sally-quinn
I’m from the midwest. A co-worker was in California in early December. Got very sick a few days after getting home with what was written off as the flu. He said he’d never been that ill. He recently was able to get an antibody test on a place doing validation studies and his came back positive for COVID-19 antibodies.
Lee Ann:
Wow, that’s astounding. EARLY December.
I am about 80% convinced that my wife and I had it in EARLY December.
I have taken the flu vaccine every year since it has been offered because I worked (as a vendor) in many different health care facilities. I have not had the flu in over ten years. However, right around Thanksgiving, I started feeling signs of an oncoming upper respiratory infection. By the following weekend – the first weekend in December – I was well and truly sick. My wife got it about the same time I did, but hers was worse.
I was hard down for about three days. I got better fairly quickly but it was about another two weeks before I felt normal again. My wife was hard down for almost two weeks. After five days, I got worried and took her to the local immediate care center. They gave her a flu kit and an inhaler because she could barely breath – which was one of the symptoms we both had. The inhaler did the trick and she immediately started feeling better. But it was the end of January before she felt normal again.
Of course, at the time nobody had even heard of CoVid-19, or Kung-Flu, or whatever you want to call it, so we thought it must have been some kind of weird flu. Some of our symptoms were the same as a classic flu, but some were not. Now, when I read the symptoms of CoVid-19, they match exactly the symptoms that we both had.
Now, I understand that I could be mistaken. We both could have had some weird variant of the flu. However, I think it would be worth my while to get the antibody test to find out. But how does someone who is now asymptomatic go about doing that?
“But how does someone who is now asymptomatic go about doing that?” – Ray
So far as I know, there is no medical institution offering tests to random people who think they had it, just controlled investigations of special populations (prisons, nursing homes, etc.).
I was looking for some more possible answers to Ray’s question, and discovered that WebMD is following the now-common practice of buttering both sides of their bread.
https://blogs.webmd.com/webmd-doctors/20200415/wondering-if-you-could-have-had-covid19-last-fall
To summarize: we know that the virus was in China in November & December; we’ve identified slightly different strains in the USA in January & February; but, we weren’t testing everybody that early, and more people had the coronavirus than we once thought, and we really want to find out how many have already had it, BUT DON’T YOU DARE SUGGEST that YOU were infected last fall — that’s unscientific anecdotes, and only WE have the data.
You aren’t one of the crumbs of evidence we want to pursue.
Questions, seriously: How are the researchers dating the advent of the strains they found in January & February? How long were those in the country (earliest known date of infection)? Where did the infected people get those particular strains, and where were/are the people who had the genetic progenitors?
This opinion piece is a bit more welcoming of the idea of early infection, but only back to December. It gives us the state of the art as of April 7, so is somewhat out of date, but is pushing the same line (in the last sentence) as was WebMD 20 days later.
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/could-i-have-already-had-coronavirus
So, maybe Ray and his wife just had some weird variant of the flu, but the researchers at this point seem so convinced they already know where to look for the answers, they aren’t really interested in finding out if they actually do know all the answers.
And You-Book/Face-Tube will suppress anyone who gets different answers anyway.