Yeah, it's almost certainly way overblown. People are freaking out over a bad flu season. I could see a case made in a future retrospective that the exponential increase we're seeing in cases is actually an exponential increase in the number of available tests disseminated.

Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did.

Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.

With modern genomic science, we can pinpoint almost the exact time and place Covid-19 jumped from an animal host (likely pangolins intermediate host from bat reservoir) to humans.

It almost certainly jumped hosts to humans in November of 2019[1]. It has not been circulating in humans for long.

Indeed, several scientific publications have come out in the past decade that more or less predicted that a similar strain of SARS would jump hosts and become a pandemic disease[2].

Also, technically the Spanish Flu was just a bad flu season, right? Now, few believe now that Covid-19 will be nearly as bad as the 1918 pandemic (at least in its current mutation), but it will almost certainly worse than the 1957 flu pandemic, which was bad enough and which resulted in many governmental edicts similar to today, with many school and library closings.

I agree we need to keep cool and not overreact or panic, but we also need to take this thing very seriously. Even the experts are trying to figure this thing out. Disease modeling has come a long way since 1918, but modelers are not seers.

1. https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/dna-sleuths-read-coronav...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/educational-magazines/inf...

Right now tests are being allocated to critically ill or dead people suspected of Covid-19. Ideally most cause of deaths are caught so the absolute number of deaths are a decent indicator of spread, but they are lagged by probably 7-14 days or the time until critical + testing and reporting time.

Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.

AMA: Was it any different than a bad flu for you?

After a week long light dry cough, it was rapid onset and more resperatory/lung focused kind of immune response, almost like a lung infection. The acronyms SARS is a pretty good description.

Basically I think it slowly invades your lungs but finally your immune system figures it out and goes all-in. What triggered it was some vigorous excersize which wiped me out. I call that day 1 but it was after over a week of the cough. Day 1-2 occasionnaly had a 99.0F fever but often lower/normal. Had two nights where I felt congestion developing in lungs and then third day got to 100.8F at 5pm... that night-BAM-woke up at 4am with cold sweats and a strong even burning in both lungs (probably immune system working on it). Lungs felt raw breathing in air. Turned on the shower to get some humidity and the burning subsided but then lungs started swelling up and breathing difficulties began. Luckily I took a bunch of benedryl and was able to breathe more after an hour of calm, but was close to calling ambulance. After that I've now had one OK night with a lot of localizing immune activity but at a lower level. On a scale from feeling lousy (1) to dead (10) the progression each night was 1,2,5,2.. (and hopefully continuing down..).

Get well soon, and thank you for sharing!

Do you have any underlying health conditions?

No I'm super healthy, 32 yr old, competitive runner.

I have a suspicion that I may have had it even longer than a week in advance and it spread more in the lungs than normal.

today is a 2.5

it kind of sucks, do your best to avoid it.

I had the worst cold around christmas and it really does make me wonder.

Fever, body aches for a couple days. Felt like I was going to cough up a lung.

but no real sneezing or congestion.