I have a friend in Philly who swears he had it around the holidays in December. Said he had a flu that wiped him out for a few days - said he had never had anything like it. After SARS-CoV-2 blew up and symptoms were being discovered, he swears that it's what he had.
Even if it wasnt Sars-COV-2, something odd was going around as early as December and January, all over the country. Everyone who got it said it was like nothing they had before. The cough was horrible, and it caused headaches in less symptomatic people.
Same for me back in early February. When you think about it, how many people just ride out flu-like symptoms, and how many doctors order official test to confirm influenza? It’s possible this virus was in stealth mode all over the place for awhile last year.
I had pretty bad Corona-like symptoms in late January/Feb in London. There was documented community transmission at that point, but it was very early (single digits) so it's technically possible but not mathematically likely that I had it.
The more I've mentioned this to people, the more I've heard people bring up their own stories and theories that they all had super bad flus this year unlike any other year and are all convinced they already had COVID. So everyone has convinced themselves that they already got it, no matter what city they were in at the time and whether they got sick in November or February.
This is hard to grapple with because I'm sure that any give year, a lot of people randomly get a bad flu like they've never had before with unique symptoms. And if you happen to be that person this year, then of course you would think you had this new disease that matches the symptoms. But given the lack of secondary community effects at the same time (other hospitalizations in your area), it's more likely that most of us are wrong and it's just a co-incidence. But if you are the person suffering the coincidence, it appears the same as if you are the person who actually got infected.
So who knows? I guess until antibody tests are widely available, none of us will know for sure.
How good is your memory of first-hand accounts of weird, extra-severe flu-like illnesses from coworkers and friends in previous years? One possibility is that people get weird severe flu-like illnesses fairly regularly (perhaps every few years for most people), and they recount those experiences to their coworkers and friends, and no one thinks much of it until there is a global pandemic of a respiratory illness.
I can only recall one such illness that I experienced. I was in college living on campus, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck for 2 days before I made it to the campus clinic. I tested positive for influenza, but if I hadn’t, and this pandemic had happened 6 months later, I almost certainly would have been tempted to attribute it as one of these supposed extremely early cases.
Anecdote: Metro NYC area. First week of March something weird ripped through my household. Wife lost all sense of taste and smell - complained she couldn't taste my cooking - and had a pretty bad cold. Kids and wife got weird pink eye at the same time with pink rings around their eyes. I was very lethargic during the same period of time and when I would lay down would get waves of chills through my body.
No clue if it was COVID-19, but it was strange. And we're ground zero for it (I work in Manhattan and used to commute every day on public transit).
I didn’t have anything early (I’ve never caught it despite multiple direct exposures, but I rarely get sick from anything anyway), but both my wife and son-in-law came back from separate business trips in late January/early Feb 2020 with all the classic symptoms. Both subsequently caught Covid in 2022 and both described the experience as very similar to their 2020 experiences.
No way to know for sure if it was Covid in 2020 since no testing at the time of their illness, but I would not be willing to bet against the possibility despite all the “it would have been impossible due to…” theorizing some folks have said on this thread.
In the last few days of January and two weeks in early February in Manhattan, I (26M) got quite sick. The first few days were pretty bad and I had 102F fever. I had lots of difficulty breathing and a dry cough for around 2 weeks after. A friend/co-worker who sits next to me at work had essentially identical symptoms 12 hours before me lasting for similar amount of time. I think his breathing problems were less bad than mine.
The worst hit me on the weekend and I returned to work on Monday with the cough.
Around 1 week prior I attended a company holiday party at a large museum with (probably?) one thousand attendees from all over the world. They mostly came from the EU, but at least some from APAC as well.
I have no evidence that this was COVID-19, but in retrospect the symptoms matched reasonably well and I haven't been sick since.
There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics.
Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season.
I've heard stories like this from a lot of people in Dec/Jan/Feb. Many of them carried on in the months that followed as if they were already in possession of antibodies, believing that they "already had covid".
As others have pointed out, there are lots of cold-and-flu style illnesses endemic in the human population. There are antibody tests that can tell you reasonably authoritatively, if you're actually curious.
Absolutely, I also had a strange flu that could have been it in early to mid February. First I dismissed Covid,but later I did find a one hop link with someone who was tested positive. But until I can get tested (or my intermediary) its just guesswork.
I’m waiting on these antibody tests as well. My symptoms weren’t as bad as yours but I too had an illness around that time, and so did a fair number of people around me, I remember joking with my drinking buddy that I probably got whatever it was from her. I’m still mostly convinced that whatever it was, it wasn’t COVID-19, but I can’t ignore the sheer number of stories that I keep hearing from people about a strange illness in that time frame. Some medical professionals who I’ve heard on various podcasts addressed these anecdotes and say it probably wasn’t COVID-19, and let’s be fair, it most likely wasn’t.
I would still like a way to prove or disprove it though, and same as you, anyone I’ve talked to about it says the antibody tests just aren’t good enough yet to prove anything conclusively.
Even the data we do have available sucks. There’s a bunch of States and counties which still aren’t reporting or aren’t reliably reporting recoveries which is artificially inflating the active case count in the United States.
A little tin-foily, but I went to Vegas with my family in late December. About 2 weeks after we got back, my dad had a severe case of the flu (so far as we know) and so did my cousin's girlfriend. They were both showing symptoms similar to Covid-19, but because testing was not available then, it's hard to say for sure. And it was flu season then.
I live in MA and got very sick on Feb 26, then had a horrible cold. My wife is a doctor, and she thought I just had one of the many things going around.
I asked her if it was COVID-19 and she looked at the CDC's web site and said she didn't think so. Then a week later she flew out of Logan to spend a weekend in LA. I also went skiing in New Hampshire twice, and went to two networking events!
Throughout March I had symptoms that I never had in my life... I couldn't get a test! The symptoms went away after 4 weeks.
Did I have it? I have no idea, but if I got it, it most likely came from her or my kids, who all felt kinda wonky in mid February. My wife had a very bad headache two weeks before I got sick.
Even if so, considering the length of incubation and allowing for a decent Ro, there were very very few cases of COVID-19 in the US in Dec-early Jan. If someone claims they had it at the time based on respiratory virus symptoms, the overwhelming odds are still on they having been one of the hundreds of thousands of symptomatic flu or similar cases, not one of the handful of COVID cases.
Oh definitely. I think that I may have had it near the start of the pandemic (fatigue/flu like symptoms for a few weeks) but my wife didn't have any antibodies (but I did wear a mask everywhere for the first while I had symptoms).
It's a very odd disease in terms of spread, there's super high variance in transmissibility.
We live in NYC. Beginning of 2020, my partner and I entertained a friend who flew in from France. Shortly afterwards, we both got sick with what was the most persistent "flu" that we ever had (lasting 3 weeks or so). No tests available, so no confirmation if it was Covid.
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