If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.
And roughly three-quarter of infections are asymptomatic[2], so ~120 million total cases annually.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221326001...
Lots of estimates, I usually see it as around one-third of cases having no symptoms: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646474/
I’ll take a slight leap and guesstimate this means a lot of flu infections are around the symptom level of a mild or bad cold as well.
When you know you have the flu, it’s probably the flu, but it’s much harder to self-determine that you don’t have the flu.
When people exaggerate a common cold into "the flu" I respond with equal exaggeration by insisting I take them to the hospital.
Adults catch real flu about once every five years, scientists calculate, based on a field study in China.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31698038
on average, about 8% of the U.S. population gets sick from flu each season, with a range of between 3% and 11%, depending on the season.
Yeah, this is 100 percent not the reason people think covid isn’t real.
The flus not hard to avoid, and might have gone extinct with the lockdowns
EDIT: i dont take the flu vaccine
How do you tell the difference between a terrible cold and flu? Doctors can't tell the difference from symptoms alone, do you have yourself tested each time you have a cold?
might have gone extinct with the lockdowns
That's not likely, and with fewer people exposed to the flu and gaining natural immunity, there may even be a big spike in flu cases if social distancing and mask wearing are relaxed next flu season.
This is unlikely as humans aren’t the only hosts for influenza. Almost all can infect birds and most can infect pigs. Probably some other humans too. And jump between eachother and humans.
We might have the same issue with COVID: vaccinating all humans may not eradicate it if some animals serve as natural reservoirs (mink maybe? Ferrets?).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Whereas colds are more congestion with drowsiness.
But you're totally right, symptoms alone are hard to use for accurately knowing what you had, there are so many types of cold virus and bacteria out there too.
I guess for me, I had never had the symptoms I describe in the former, until a few years ago I did, which I thought of as getting the flu. Had it been early 2020, I might have wondered if it was Covid, given the description of symptoms.
If you develop symptoms abruptly and you have a fever and/or body aches it's almost certainly the flu.
The difference is quite significant and a doctor should know the difference.
I was 40 the first (and only) time I caught flu. I went to the doctor. I don't go to the doctor for a bad cold.
Maybe there are light flus. I don't know - but I don't want the real thing again.
I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
His wife was still suffering side effects months later. Their grade school aged son had a fever for a couple of days.
I got absolutely royally fucked up by influenza and "sicker than I've ever been in my adult life" -- and I'm 49 -- but it was Jan 2019 not Dec 2019, so I'm pretty certain it wasn't COVID.
Probably 5% of the population every winter gets "sicker than they've ever been in their adult life" with some horrible influenza/bronchitis/pneumonia.
If everyone who got "sicker than they've ever been" in Dec 2019 were actually sick with COVID then January would have decimated long term care facilities around the United States. Instead you can't see any upward trend in excess mortality in Jan. If anything Jan and Feb were slightly low and the trend doesn't become apparent until late March.
My guess is now they know what it was.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/clinician_gu...
There's also a lot of other cold and flu viruses other than influenza, and just a normal rhinhovirus cold virus can cause bronchitis or pneumonia.
If you had extensive direct contact with someone COVID positive and didn't take precautions then you just got kind of lucky. You weren't immune.
Which is why talking in absolutes makes you sound less credible, not more.
Meanwhile there was also an unusually bad flu going around at the same time affecting a high single digit percentage of the population. So ok it’s not impossible you caught COVID. There is a small but real chance, but it’s probably tens or even hundreds of thousands to one against.
I suspect it was the flu though. My desk neighbour at work was hospitalised for the flu (tested and confirmed) a week earlier. I had been vaccinated, but it's mayve the case I had a more mild case than he did thanks to the vaccination.
That being said, my partner is a nurse and was the only person in her department not to get covid. WE did get tested for covid antibodies in late 2020 and didn't have any, but it's possible they had diminished by then if it really was covid.
But the simplest explanation is still that it was just the flu.
That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say.
I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been struggling more with concentration issues and depression since then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation in the US, etc.
The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.
I had a viral illness back in July with symptoms that couldn't rule out Covid-19. I went to get tested the very next day as soon as I possibly could have and quarantined while I waited. At the time I got tested I was told the backlog was on the order of 3-5 days for Quest. I ended quarantine 2 weeks later, not because I got test results back, but because they waited so long that even if it came back positive I already met the CDC guidelines to end quarantine regardless. Rather than processing the tests they could manage in a timely fashion they were wasting tests on samples so old it didn't even matter what the result was.
Rather than a priority queue they should have been handling tests like a priority stack. I'm sure it would suck to be told "sorry we're not going to check your sample, assume it's positive" but at least then you could manage quarantine and contact tracing in a timely manner instead of waiting so long it's basically useless. Not to mention the government no doubt paid Quest for all of those useless tests vs. Quest only getting paid for the amount they could do in a timely manner. Doing it a reasonable way would just be throwing money away for them.
But it's very unlikely it was Covid, because Covid is much more infectious and more deadly than both colds and flu.
People weren't masking or taking any precautions then, so Covid would have spread very quickly indeed. And that would have created an obvious medical emergency, with hospitals at full capacity and a clear peak in unexpected deaths.
Relatively minor symptoms, no huge increase in hospitalisations, and no huge peak in deaths all suggest Covid wasn't the culprit.
In mid-November there could have only been cryptic spread around Wuhan. That means that maybe at the outside 3,000 people around Wuhan had the virus at that point (which I'm likely being generous with that number). Your chances of having contracted it in Shanghai is low. 3,000 people sounds like a lot but China has a population of 1.4 billion people. Your odds are 1-in-500,000 -- and they're much lower given the geographical separation from Wuhan to Shanghai.
You had a cold which developed into bronchitis.
Now if you told me it was mid-January and that you lost your sense of smell so completely that you couldn't smell food burning on the stove and when it came back meat taste rancid, I'd agree you probably had it.
I'm allowing for 3,000 active cases in mid-November in Wuhan. It is expected that "patient zero" was closer to September, and I'm aware of the evidence from WHO and the genetic "dating" that leads to September/October timeframes for when it emerged.
That still doesn't get it all over Shanghai by mid-November.
And if there were more than 3,000 cases in mid-November the problem with the way the virus doubles every 3 days and kills about 1% (particularly before we knew anything about it) is that if you increase that number then you wind up with bodies stacking up way too high.
And now if you assume that there was more than cryptic spread in literally a handful of people in Shanghai in mid-November then by mid-January it would have been slaughtering people in Shanghai in a way that couldn't have been hidden, and Shanghai would have looked like Wuhan wound up looking.
And taking 3,000 active cases in Wuhan in mid-November you get 3,000,000 cases in mid-December after exponential growth, which is 35% of the population which is way over the 7% seroprevalence in April 2020.
Once this virus really gets going it doesn't hide. It can only be around in a population for about 2 months before the bodies really stack up and you cannot miss it (it was probably around Wuhan a bit longer than 2 months without detection because the progenitor virus strain was less well adapted).
I thought I had COVID around February/March 2020. Roughly a year ago antibody tests became readily available, so I got one, and it came back negative. There was a strain of the flu going around during the winter of 2019-2020 that was not protected against by the flu vaccine, that I suspect is contributing to a lot of the confirmation bias (and I'm guessing is what I had at the time).
I'm honestly surprised there's so many people in this thread who think they had COVID but never got the antibody test. They're cheap and quick, and if you could have confirmed you had COVID antibodies, at least for me that would have been a huge stress reliever during the last 12-18 months of pandemic lockdowns.
Finally I went and got a COVID antibody test to satisfy my curiosity, which was negative on all factors.
I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc since March '20, but I'm not sure that would have prevented antibody formation if I was infected. Seems to me it would not, but that's not based on any really informed judgment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system?wprov=sfl...
It isn't impossible but the lack of antibodies is just one further data point. Most people who recover have positive antibody tests.
Are you referring to the quantitative side? You can simply buy the antibody standard and sVNT test kit from Genscript. You can get a 96 test kit for under $3k. We have it and it works quite well.
a single paper discussing false reports - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14574997/
First, there's no scientific basis for doing so. Unless your diet is deficient of zinc or you're spending months in an overcast winter environment neither is going to do anything for you. They certainly won't have any impact on antibody formation.
I would encourage most people here to have their Vitamin D levels checked and take supplements, especially in the winter months.
Also certain diets could have other deficiencies, like in my case I almost never eat fish so I add omega3 (DHA).
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
The evidence for vitamin D is much stronger including multiple randomized controlled trials.
"No scientific basis" doesn't necessarily mean "false", otherwise you create a world where everything not mandatory is forbidden. Many doctors do exist in this world; they're always totally confident even when they're wrong, and they will tell you to not do things unless it's the specific thing they want you to do.
I'd imagine this would include ~30-40% of Americans.
Theres no scientific basis for anything until a proper study is done. Doesn't mean it isn't true. And consider that estimates are as high as 50% of scientific papers’ results are false (especially in bio).
N.B.1: I'm a scientist in a government lab
N.B. 2: I’m not impugning science, just fellow scientists.
Source?
"Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields" is a ridiculous claim. I don't know a single scientist who believes that. How many scientists have you spoken to in the bio field?
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
but the PCR test said it wasn't covid, and it can't have been all that contagious because neither of my roommates got sick. so yeah, sometimes people just get sick.
Like the nice song from They Bay be Giants "Put it to the test" says:
A fact is just a fantasy Unless it can be checked
Or, you know, the most obvious thing. You had the flu, during flu season.
When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.
Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France had a few cases before then, but it died out.
This is from late last year, an article that attempted to group the mutations into "L", "G", "S", "O", etc, strains: https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/EVOLUTION/yx...
You can see where it compares infections to proportion of strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7 countries listed here, but I think I remember a different article that had more, and the pattern was pretty consistent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-varian...
>why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?
This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically the news alone could be responsible for increased stress, much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data available regarding certain bio markers like increased cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases before the media reporting).
But let’s say for example where media ( I suppose backed by statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-virus-ranged-from-illi...
Why not sample earlier blood and see how far back COVID originated.
Because if people found out that Covid had been spreading in the US for months before the “official” starting date of March 2020, they’d come to realize that they would have never even realized there was a pandemic going on were it not for the media attention.
But actually this should make you suspicious of such anecdotes.
There's just much too many of them for them all to be covid.
So they really count as evidence that people just get weird colds and flus.
And hence that the weird cold you had in November 2019 was just a weird non-covid cold.