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A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

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Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#21

Post by vmception »

gowld wrote: post #18
cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

Why didn't all of you spread the disease to everyone else in the neighborhood?

Not trying to spread misinformation, since we know that one function of this coronavirus weakens your immune system as well as protective lining to the lungs for opportunistic additional viruses and bacteria to get you, then if those other viruses and bacteria never show up then more people would be fine.

No different than the "clinical latency" stage of HIV where nothing happens for a decade until your immune system weakens and then a benign opportunistic infection causes you problems. Here it just happens a lot faster - while this coronavirus is also executing other functions in multiple different organs.

This leads to the possibility that there are other seasonal but otherwise benign viruses and bacteria that are prevalent, while this coronavirus is also spreading.

Is that really as much of a farfetched idea if everyone has been looking a different direction? Just harder to resolve and an area to put some energy and research.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#22

Post by toyg »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #16
butler14 wrote: post #4

Isn't it considerably more likely that the flu they all had from CES was... well... the flu? Given January is the tail-end of flu season?

Incidentally I’ve noticed tons of people talking about having come down sick at the beginning of January in the US and assuming they must have had covid. It’s like people forgot how many different respiratory infections are out there.

We’ve gone from “covid19 is just a flu” to “the flu was really covid19 !!11!!”.

It will take years of research to untangle truth from “feelings”.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#23

Post by fourbits »

nyczomg wrote: post #20
cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories... I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she…

It's called the Nocebo effect [1]. It's discussed on Mind Field S2 E6 The Power of Suggestion.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#24

Post by izend »

nyczomg wrote: post #20
cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories... I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she…

Three reasons to why it may not have been "noticed":

1. Early on it had only spread in a small percentage of the populace so the absolute number of deaths was too low to be noticed.

2. The deaths from the regular flu this year were very low, see: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

3. The antibodies test out of Europe and NYC are pointing to an IFC around 0.35-0.6 which could "only" be 3-6x the bad 2017 flu season, note Covid19 is still the worse pandemic in decades.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#25

Post by hashmymustache »

ejstronge wrote: post #6

Retrospective antibody testing should be viewed carefully, given the relatively low specificity (i.e., high rate of false positives). If there’s a high clinical suspicion (could be relevant in this case, though it may also represent the normal flu), the utility of the testing improves.

Where are you getting low specificity for antibody tests? Most I’ve seen are 98+% with lower sensitivities.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#26

Post by chrononaut »

cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

> I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought.

Perhaps, but if it was, it was certainly happening at a significantly low rate, although that's probably how they all get started given that's it's expotential.

Since this has a higher fatality rate than traditional, common viruses I'd be most interested in the death rate of the population versus the normal average. Much like the NYTimes did for NYC[0], although much of data for 2019 seems to be absent unfortunately.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#27

Post by cameldrv »

cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

You can buy 'em now on Alibaba. Not FDA approved, Your Accuracy May Vary.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#28

Post by cblum »

gowld wrote: post #18
cblum wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation. These are my personal opinions. I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019 than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 in the US . There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange pneumo…

Why didn't all of you spread the disease to everyone else in the neighborhood?

I stayed home the whole time. Was totally shot. And if they're right about COVID-19 spreading asymptomatically around 2 days before symptoms start, if my memory serves me right that would have coincided with the weekend for me.

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#29

Post by cblum »

izend wrote: post #24
nyczomg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories... I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she…

Three reasons to why it may not have been "noticed": 1. Early on it had only spread in a small percentage of the populace so the absolute number of deaths was too low to be noticed. 2. The deaths from the regular flu this year were very low, see: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ 3. The antibodies test out of Europe and NYC are pointing to an IFC around 0.35-0.6 which could "only" be 3-6x the bad 2017 flu seas…

I'm sorry, what is IFC?

Re: A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January

#30

Post by cblum »

fourbits wrote: post #23
nyczomg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out some of my own crackpot theories... I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep and she…

It's called the Nocebo effect [1]. It's discussed on Mind Field S2 E6 The Power of Suggestion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

Going off a tangent here but just wanted to comment how powerful the nocebo effect can be.

I'm familiar with it in the context of strength sports, where "tweaking" your back, knees, etc. is relatively common.

If you tweak something and immediately go "oh no no no I'm gonna be out for weeks now", it does happen. The pain only seems to get worse for days, you can't move, if it's your lower back sometimes you can barely get out of bed.

When you learn to distinguish between "I'm hurt" (something felt a little funny and it hurt a bit, but you're still functional) vs "I'm injured" (something actually went really wrong, like a major muscle strain, or blunt trauma), and learn to keep a positive attitude in the face of pain, you're back in a couple days.

There's a group called Barbell Medicine that completely changed my mindset when it comes to nocebo. They teach people to accept pain is part of life, and to assess it instead of immediately worrying or panicking about it and going into what they call "movement avoidance".

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