Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24 thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass outbreak.

Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these superspreaders.

This is why Italy got absolutely hammered quite early on. They were very unlucky to get hit by the mother of all super spreader events.

Meanwhile it looks like some other countries like France had a few cases before then, but it died out.

While I agree with the general point you and the op are making, I don’t think your specific assertion is correct. Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion; some people infect large numbers of other people, but most infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the people with these anecdotes didn’t infect anyone they know of is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I do think you’re correct that they didn’t have it).

I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might provide antibodies for some. We’ve seen that happen multiple times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin stories.

> I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February.

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.

We should have seen evidence of a variant in the USA by now, if an earlier one had existed prior to the main outbreak.

There have been many variants that emerged in the US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think perhaps the impression that there haven't been any variants stems from the fact that none of the big variants of concern have been from the US, which appears to have just been luck.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/coronavirus-varian...

First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but being it was the first time in years I had been sick I decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for the anti-bodies.

>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.