I know a person who back in January acquired something like pneumonia and a bad fever, went to the hospital for awhile and tests were negative for flu, etc. doctors just didn’t know what it was. The person has COPD however.

But anecdotally I’ve noticed quite a few more colleagues over the last few months out sick “with the flu or something”. No idea.

They’re still only testing people with symptoms. We need a randomizes test and a test for antibodies to have any idea how much it has already spread.

If it’s as contagious as they say and spreads in asymptotic people then why wouldn’t there be a significant population that has acquired and recovered from this? Many probably with very mild symptoms.

I could just be in denial right now as well.

The only places I've seen the first US infection being dated that early are conspiracies on Chinese social media that claim the origin of COVID19 to be the US instead of Wuhan. The only way that theory works is to date the first infection in the US and claim that Americans bought it into China during the Wuhan Military games. That theory is easy enough to debunk with common sense because if the US had COVID first the hospitals would be completed overwhelmed before China's was, but it's not the first time wishful thinking's buried common sense in Chinese history.

I don't know anyone that credibly believes it was in the US in November. We did, however, that something was amiss that early, and if the US had a pandemic response team who's job was to see something like this coming, we could have been getting testing ready since then.

Or the fatality and hospitalization rates have been overestimated due to severity bias.

We know this to be true, actually. We just don’t have good estimates of what the true rates are.

It wouldn’t be shocking at all to find out the virus is already widespread, and only slightly more dangerous than influenza.

Even in Italy, if there is widespread infection, the ~4k dead would reflect a low mortality rate.

In italy in hard hit city, they were unable to cremate people fast enough and army had to move bodies. Influenza does not cause that.

The error bars on CFR estimates run from fractions of a percent to a few percent. In countries that have tested large numbers of people who are not severely ill, the case fatality rates have been at the low end of that range.

This isn’t “shocking to epidemiologists”, it’s shocking only to people who dismiss basic facts and try to use irrelevant distractions (like cremation rates) to incite fear.

Epidemiologists do count with overwhelmed hospitals and services, excess deaths due that that, excess deaths on unrelated heath problems. It not just something they talk about, they have it in their models too. This does not happen with influenza, because it is easier to control. Irrelevant distraction there is Italy or Spain lately.

Epidemiologists do talk also about costs after epidemic ends, in treatment of people who will need care for long.

What amateurs do is to ignore all the above, pick up case fatality ration in well run non-overwhelmed health care system and pretend that is situation same as influenza to feel good.

Not that I have heard of. You’re going to have to cite some evidence here.

(They’re both respiratory viruses with similar R0, so your evidence needs to be pretty extraordinary to be convincing.)

Especially asymtomatic. You’d not be coughing or sneezing more than usual which must have some effect.

Just a thought. No one seems to have mentioned this idea.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

Because all the effects are limited by the time it takes for them to happen. We know the speed of growth, it's much faster than the expected recovery times. From all known COVID-19 cases the number of recovered are still dominated by the recovered in China.

   China: reported cases: 81,008
          dead:       3,255 
          recovered: 71,740

   Whole world: reported cases: 282,395
                dead:      11,822
                recovered: 93,189

That’s exactly what happened to my dad in February.