An acquaintance of mine was actually sick in November with COVID-like symptoms. They had a dry cough that was so nasty, doctors tested them for whooping cough (pertussis) and it was negative. And, it actually was not too long after their office got a visit from some overseas partners from China. IIRC, they even said one of the Chinese visitors had a bit of a cough at the time. I think this is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they may have had the virus. At the very least, it's enough evidence that this person should definitely get an antibody test as soon as practical.
Edit: I initially forgot to include that the pertussis test was negative, although that was certainly implied.
> and it was bad enough that the testing company lost their contract (whether they were fudging numbers or not is debatable, I can't find any good information on it either)
Ah yea. That happened in California and Florida for sure, probably other places too. In Florida there were two labs specially that were reporting 100% positive for weeks, I don’t care how badly they had it, that wasn’t actually possible.
You probably had it, my personal experience was I got it early and aside from two days of flu symptoms it was gone. Didn’t know until I gave blood months later and had positive antibodies.
> This has left me pretty disappointed with the medical community in the general.
If you're sick or have some sort of symptoms, you better hope it's something common. Everything else is basically guesswork and then you try some different medicines or run some different tests and hope something sticks.
> I probably caught the virus early on, and it wasn't particularly bad for me (even compared to typical flu).
Do you have reason to believe that, or were you sick in January/February and just kind of assume that was it, even though we were at the height of regular cold and flu season?
> but simply having a positive test result isn’t the sign of long term immunity people assume
You were overly dismissive in your first mention of this. Do you have data behind the tests being false positive? Multiple positive tests + symptoms are surely sufficient
> That it wasn't predictable or obvious flu cases would go to near zero.
How could it not be predictable? I get the cold/flu when I or someone in the family is exposed to someone sick and it gets passed on.
If we're all staying in the house and not going anywhere for a year, by what mechanism could we possibly get sick? Seemed predictable to me.
In any case, it's been so awesome to not be sick in over a year. With elementary school kid, it used to be I was sick every few weeks all year long. Not looking forward to going back to that kind of normal.
As someone who really hopes there will be a long-lasting immunity, I really, really hope you had a bad flu.
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