About 6 weeks ago, I had a cold. I didn't think much about it, because at that time the virus wasn't supposed to have arrived here (reports started a week later). I had a dry cough initially, chills on two nights, but without fever, and some light trouble of breathing, which isn't that unusual for me in Winter and I blamed on my allergic asthma.
However, when it was mostly over, I noticed that I wasn't able to smell my daughter's dirty diapers. Usually I am pretty good at smelling her even if she's in another room, but I smelled absolutely nothing, even when changing the diaper. That was long before I read the first reports of anosmia. Ever since I wonder whether I already got it.. I guess I will never know..
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.
The point is, often things that are quite common but otherwise unnoticed all of a sudden appear to be an outbreak due to some sort of new found public consciousness. Everybody is analyzing their latest cough and fever so you are going to get a lot more stories of people with coronavirus symptoms even if people getting those sorts of symptoms is quite common (relatively speaking). It's just reporting of those symptoms has increased.
With respect to COVID-19, the real sign of its unusualness is the increase in hospital admissions for respiratory issues.
There were an increase in outbreaks, flu related deaths, and I believe hospitalizations around the end of the year in California when comparing 2018 to 2019.
I could be just the flu, but it could also be the start of something else circulating with the flu. Even in that case odds are that something else was not covid-19, but it could be. The only way to tell would be to test blood collected at the time for serological evidence of covid-19.
I don't have a source handy, I think it was Prof. Drosten, but I've read that in Germany, there were many such anecdotal stories as well. The blood serum of these people got tested, and there was no indication that any of them had already had covid-19.
Of course, that's Germany, not London or the US, but at least there, the evidence currently points to a bad flu or something else for all these people from November to February.
The flu season just past was unusually bad, even by comparison with e.g. 2017-18, which was itself no walk in the park.
It's not a safe bet for anyone to assume on that basis that they've already had the coronavirus and are now immune. Those bad flu-like symptoms were flu symptoms, and confer no immunity against SARS-CoV-2.
Yes. I remember pre-covid a lot of people in the UK were looking at Australia's flu season which was really rough -- hospitalising a lot more people than usual flu seasons -- and we were trying to get as many staff and patients immunised as possible.
The basic theory is most people have a bad flu every year then forget about it. As far as I recall I've had the flu exactly twice in my life. Once this year, once last year.
I'm in quite the same boat. Heavily affected area. My whole family was sick in the period around the first notified case in the country. All the typical symptoms, but no-one severe. My wife still hardly smells.
... and still. I think it's a social psychology phenomenon. If I talk to our baker, her family has the same story. Friends as well. We all might like to believe we've had it and so we lightly skew the facts to fit our perception and hope. What I know as a fact (data released today) is that mortality was not rising in my region until two weeks after 'patient zero'. In our case three weeks after the first ill kid.
Occam's razor: It would be very hard to imagine wide-spread asymptomatic cases without symptomatic cases and deaths. No deaths means no spread. So we had something else.
I've heard this a lot, but there is another possible explanation - just speculating - that covid did appear and we're in the middle of a 2nd and more dangerous wave. IIRC 1918 flu behaved a bit like this, 2nd wave was more deadly. I'd really like to know if that's plausible, if any disease experts could speculate.
But what’s the theory then? If there was a widespread milder version of covid going around in places long before the deadly one took hold, then the newer deadlier strain would still have to be transmitted into each region separately. I don’t think it’s feasible that the mild strain spread globally and then flipped a switch and turned much deadlier all around the globe.
When would the first wave have happened? If it were in the last year we'd see immune response to the virus in the antibody tests now rolling out. And if happened before the current wave we'd expect to see a substantial degree of herd immunity and not be having the current epidemic spread so fast.
...I just saw a comment somewhere on here, possibly in another post, of someone wondering why took so long to spread given asymptomatic + pre-symptom spreading.
It means that most of those genetic variants don't change which proteins are coded for (the genetic code is redundant) and the remaining ones don't make any difference to disease progression. Well, there was one mutation in Singapore where one of the non-structural proteins got knocked out creating a strain that was less virulent but better able to hide from the immune system. Zoonaotic diseases usually become less virulent over time in general and a strain like that might become dominant after a number of years. But don't expect any noticeable changes in during the current outbreak except maybe in a few small pockets.
The ambiguity I was addressing was grammatical, not biological.
"now significant" could be a typo for "known significant", "non-significant", "no significant", "not significant", and possibly others, including not being a typo at all.
Likewise "significant" itself could mean different things in this context. E.g. phenotype neutral mutations can be highly informative when tracing origins, mutations in "non-coding" regions can have huge regulatory effects, etc.
I agree that your interpretation of the post to which I responded is plausible, but it's not the only one.
Good question, I don't know. Maybe the much milder strain went by so quistly there was no testing for a novel disease so we never knew. I don't know if that's plausible though.
It is not hard to imagine. If the number of serious cases is very low compared to total cases it will take a massive number of infected till serious cases start to stand out.
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.
I had what I thought was definitely whooping cough in November. Tested negative and thought well there is definitely going to be a new disease surfacing.
Skip ahead and covid 19 happens. I thought, this is definitely what I had.
However, the faux whooping cough lasted months and the cough was very characteristic, cough so hard you struggle to breathe back in. It doesn't chime perfectly with covid-19, I've yet to hear of a cough lasting more than 2 weeks.
My mother-in-law had an absolutely BRUTAL flu in early February. It was so bad my sister-in-law had to live with her for a while and take care of her. She had really, really bad fevers and an absolutely horrible dry cough that seems to have left some lasting damage even now. It took her about 3 weeks to get better.
There's no evidence that it was Covid-19. But she is a nanny for a family of doctors in Boston so it's not impossible that it's it.
Yeah, this year has been especially weird for me. I typically don't get sick with the flu or common cold - until Dec 12 last year, which I remember well because it was immediately after a convention, I'm usually not affected by con crud, and it affected me that Thursday and Saturday (but I was fine on Friday and afterwards except for a cough that's repeatedly come and gone since then).
It really doesn't fit the timeline since it didn't officially hit the US until a month and a half later, so I don't think this is what I had then, but still, there are reports that this was active in China in November, so sometimes it really makes me wonder.
In the beginning phases of testing in Denmark they found that 9 out of 10 people who showed symptoms had a bad flu or a cold. The past couple of months have been peak flu season
At the moment in Alberta, they are testing about 4K people per day, and only those showing significant or serious symptoms. Even with that filter for serious symptoms, only 2% of tests are positive. Unfortunately, this probably means that most of our flus this season, that we got over, was not us building up immunity to Covid - where I live at least.
I worry about people catching Covid and another flu simultaneously
As family we had a pretty 'bad' flu in February here in Czechia. Correction, not a bad flu - but the worst ever. It matched most of the symptoms - including coming in 2 waves.
Youngest child went almost with no symptoms. The one with strongest immune system suffered a lot.
I was sick in September/October with a cold, then left with anosmia for a few weeks. Saw a specialist who prescribed nasal steroids. No fever though. Never had amnosmia before in my life, and an pretty healthy. Anosmia is scary.
Is this not what the "Oxford study" posits, namely that many more of us have had it than we think? I believe that the transmission stats from the Diamond Princess are a strong counter argument, but by all means dig into it.
I’ve heard many stories like this, but I’m wondering how it could have had that much transmission that long ago without there being a noticeable number of unusual pneumonia deaths in those regions.
Same here. London also. The reason I believe it was it was that everyone in a group event over 3 days had some kind of in parameter illness subsequently.
Usually in office style flus only a subset of people get it.
Pay attention to the rollout of antibody tests. When available, those will tell you whether your blood contains immunoglobulins targeting the virus, and thus whether you've had it.
If you have, consider also paying attention to news about serum transfusion projects in your area. That's a process by which an immune person donates antibody-containing plasma, which is then transfused into patients with active disease or at-risk people to supplement their immune system with "targeting data" for the disease. It can significantly improve people's chances, and is one of the longer-term (and admittedly less likely, since no one is really certain yet whether or how well it'll work) possibilities I'm looking at for how to effectively volunteer as an immune person once my own COVID-19 case resolves.
Poor college student story. Years ago when I was in college, a friend of mine was overjoyed when he got mono. Turns out a place in town would let you sell your blood, and they gave you a lot if you had just had it.
Yeah I'm in an Asian country and a lot of people I know think they had it two months ago.
For anyone watching government reactions from January, it's clear that testing was not thorough in any meaningful way in Asian nations for at least 3 months after the outbreak began in Wuhan, including truly minimal screening at airports over those months.
In other words there's an order of magnitude greater undiagnosed cases out there than reported, and I believe that fact is so clear that it should be part of mainstream coverage.
The exception being South Korea. They have been demonstrating an optimal response to this pandemic. Test everyone as fast as possible, isolate those who are positive.
That assumes that in 100 years optimality of response will be defined as fewest possible deaths in this outbreak?
(I am not saying that is not going to be true, but if the virus doesn't get effectively eradicated then it may well not end up being so? Not An Expert At All, just spitballing)
I would say that 'optimal' can loosely be defined as 'minimal negative impact to society.'
They are showing that a virus can be contained if dealt with quickly and in a coordinated fashion. This results in fewer people getting ill (and dying) as well as minimizing economic impact.
Under what circumstances would you expect an infection in the future to be more likely to cause death than an infection right now? Maybe some fad treatment will be embraced by everybody that does more harm than good? Maybe the world economy will collapse and nobody will be able to manufacture ventilators any more?
Any scenario I come up with seem very implausible compared to the idea that as we learn more about the virus our ability to treat it will improve.
Antibody tests that can detect whether you have the antibodies that the immune system develops while combating the disease already exist and will become common-place and cheap at some point. So then you will be able to know...
> because at that time the virus wasn't supposed to have arrived here
I heard that’s why several countries denied testing initially even when symptoms matched: “you can’t have coronavirus because there’s no coronavirus in <country>.” Which is rather stupid considering <country> can’t “have” coronavirus if they just deny testing.
I just didn't feel bad enough to go to a doctor. Back then fever was still considered one of the symptoms, and I didn't have any.
I should add that I live in Germany and our first major outbreak was in Heinsberg, not too far away from here, and my symptoms started about 4 days after being at the local kids carnival, the same kind of event that caused the outbreak in Heinsberg.
On the other hand, only my kids got sick roughly at the same time, but no one I know had similar symptoms...
> Back then fever was still considered one of the symptoms, and I didn't have any.
Wikipedia still lists fever as the most common symptom (87.9%), before dry cough (67.7%). But their data is from a middle of February WHO report. Is there a more recent list of symptom frequency?
Same for me. I've had one of the worst colds of my life in mid January. Symptoms were sore throat (very briefly), light nose congestion, a very strong and long-lasting dry cough, chills for about 2 nights, light fever and light chest pains. Then, I was worried about developing a bacterial pneumonia.
When I heard about the coronavirus in the beginning of February, I dismissed the possibility because of the timeline. How could it have arrived so early in Portugal?
I still don't think it was Covid-19, but recently got doubts when I heard it might have been circulating in Italy before January. We also had one of the first Covid-19 cases in the region of Lisbon in an institute co-located with ours. Many of my colleagues are Italian and most of them visited Italy during Christmas until New Year. So I'm no longer sure.
You can do a serological test (IgG/IgM) that looks for antibodies to the Coronavirus. It is a fast test and will tell you if you have had it in the past and you can safely be around people who have an active infection.
Well, you could take an antibody test when they become available. The first occurrence of the virus in Europe (I suppose?) is almost certainly underestimated. I'll add a reference to the paper if I find it again later.
EDIT: Found it: [1] J. Lourenc ̧o, R. Paton, M. Ghafari, M. Kraemer, C. Thompson, P. Simmonds, P. Klenerman, and S. Gupta. Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the sars-cov-2 epidemic. 2020.
Same for me and my wife, we had these symptoms prior to the reported first case at the time, but this week the government (Brazil) discovered that a person who died in late January has tested positive, this is one month before the previously announced first case.
I lost my sense of smell and was very tired 3 weeks ago, but otherwise I had no symptoms. I'm super curious to find out whether I had it already, although my SO was asymptomatic in the same timeframe so it seems unlikely.
I have similar story, end of February in my case. Runny nose, juicy, rather ordinary amount of cough, no fever, but loss of smell and taste for a few days, which is usually not part of it.
>> If enough people who suddenly found themselves without a sense of smell self-reported their condition, you might well create an early warning signal that told you where the virus was heading, and how fast.
I am skeptical. A test based on the sense of smell would have a very high amount of noise. There is no good, concrete measure of a person's sense of smell. One has to ask the person to get a "measurment" and it's very hard to know what different people would mean by "I can smell fine" or "I can't smell as well as I used to".
Maybe some people would convince themselves they have no sense of smell (like some people convince themselves they are gluten or lactose "intolerant"). Maybe some people who have a weak sense of smell anyway (because they smoke or live in places with a high level of air pollution) would tend to ignore having completely lost their smell.
In any case, it would be very hard to track real infections with such an unreliable measure.
reports are that the loss of sense of smell and taste are severe, sometimes total. things 'taste weird' or have no taste at all. it doesn't matter what the person's sense of smell was before - the magnitude of change reported by a noticeable amount of individuals in a geotemporal cluster is enough to trigger an alert. the key is 'noticeable amount', so you measure background noise first.
I’m covid19-positive and I don’t have any impairment in my ability to smell nor do I recall having such impairment in recent time. The most salient symptoms for me have been GI problems.
"[The doctors] concluded that roughly 80% of the people who lost their sense of smell would test positive for the coronavirus, and that somewhere between 30% and 60% of those who had tested positive for the virus had also lost their sense of smell."
covid19? --> ~30-60% chance of loss of smell
loss of smell? --> ~80% chance of covid19 [in the data they collected]
Other things can cause loss of sense of smell too, long before covid19, so it would have to be way more prevalent in covid than any other cause for that 80% to make sense. If so, that's interesting.
Does the virus damage olfactory neurons, or does it cause loss of smell via different mechanism?
For what it's worth, my grandma lost her sense of smell permanently in her 30s after a car crash. Unfortunately, now she can't tell if the food is burning.
Your point about the fallibility of self-reporting sense of smell is valid, but please don't talk about real and serious food sensitivities in such a flippant way. They aren't subjective in the same way as smell, and there are medical tests available and widely used to verify intolerances (such as the hydrogen breath test for lactose intolerance, or the intestinal biopsy for Celiac disease).
For testing by sense of smell to work with any degree of certainty, there would have to be similar tests beyond self-reporting.
There are plenty of people with real allergies and real intolerances. There are also plenty of people who don't have any allergy or intolerance and convince themselves they do. Those people make it harder for those that have real allergies and intolerances.
Alternatively, they are people that pay attention to their bodies and have intolerances that aren't strong enough to warrant a medical diagnosis but still make them feel shitty.
I'm also skeptical of the idea that they make it harder for people with "real" intolerances - in the gluten example, there's been an explosion of GF foods, products, and menu signage ever since "gluten intolerance" became a familiar phrase.
> I'm also skeptical of the idea that they make it harder for people with "real" intolerances - in the gluten example, there's been an explosion of GF foods, products, and menu signage ever since "gluten intolerance" became a familiar phrase.
Per celiac relatives, the gluten free "fad" has helped in the creation and availability of a lot more prepackaged foods in stores, but hurt in that a lot of restaurants don't take it fully seriously and do things in ways that result in cross-contamination, so there's more crap to wade through to find the truly safe gluten-free places at which to eat out.
To me it seems like the main way they "make it harder" is that _other people_ like to talk about them a lot and might be inclined to take intolerances in general (including diagnosed ones) less seriously. Which I don't really understand -- it doesn't hurt me for someone else to avoid eating something, why should I fault them for that?
Public awareness and misunderstandings of lactose intolerance are at an
all-time high. Many people erroneously believe they are lactose intolerant or
develop gastrointestinal symptoms after intake of lactose. Consequently,
lactose-containing foods such as milk and other dairy foods may be eliminated
unnecessarily from the diet. Because these foods are a major source of
calcium, low intake of them can compromise calcium nutriture. This, in turn,
can increase the risk of major chronic diseases such as osteoporosis (porous
bones) and hypertension. This review is intended to help dietetics
professionals alleviate clients' fears about lactose intolerance and recommend
dietary strategies to improve tolerance to lactose. Scientific findings
indicate that the prevalence of lactose intolerance is grossly overestimated.
Other physiologic and psychologic factors can contribute to gastrointestinal
symptoms that mimic lactose intolerance. Scientific findings also indicate
that people with laboratory-confirmed low levels of the enzyme lactase can
consume 1 serving of milk with a meal or 2 servings of milk per day in divided
doses at breakfast and dinner without experiencing symptoms. Several dietary
strategies are available to help lactose maldigesters include milk and other
dairy foods in their diet without experiencing symptoms.
The full study cites results from breath hydrogen tests to support its claim
that "the prevalence of lactose intolerance is grossly overestimated" (as
stated in the abstract, above). In particular:
A diagnose of lactose maldigestion [by an increase in breath hydrogen
concentration of 20 ppm or more above the baseline value measured by a breath
hydrogen test] does not predict the occurrence of symptoms of intolerance (12,
13, 15, 22, 28, 30). Nor can symptoms that follow lactose or milk intake be
used to diagnose low lactase levels or lactose maldigestion (28). Intolerance
symptoms after a lactose load have been demonstrated to occur in lactose
maldigesters and lactose digesters (28).
Or, in other words (citing from the paper):
There is no clear correlation between lactose maldigestion, lactose
intolerance, and milk intolerance. This may be explained by the subjectiveness
of symptoms and the quantity of lactose or milk required to demonstrate
symptoms. Strong beliefs may contribute to lactose intolerance; that is,
persons who believe they are lactose intolerant may experience symptoms
(12,30). Johnson et al (12) reported that when 45 lactase-deficient
African-Americans were fed either a lactose-containing milk or
lactose-hydrolyzed milk under boudle-blind conditions, on third of the
subjects experienced some minor intolerance to both types of milk. The
subjects' symptoms were not due to the lactose content of milk, but perhaps to
social and cultural attitudes that influenced their ability to tolerate milk
(12). In a more recent double-blind investigation, Vesa et al (3) found that
one half of lactose maldigesters reported symptoms after consuming a
lactose-free milk or a greater level of symptoms after intake of smaller
rather than larger intakes of lactose. The symptomes were due, therefore, to
factors other than lactose intake.
I note that this is one study and rather dated, but I just happened to
stumble upon it while looking for something else. There may be newer studies
in the literature that contradict this one's findings.
Edit: also, I used the term "gluten intolerance", not "coeliac disease".
Please don't accuse me of being flippant about coeliac disease when I did no
such thing.
> I am skeptical. A test based on the sense of smell would have a very high amount of noise. There is no good, concrete measure of a person's sense of smell.
Parents with young children in diapers might disagree. I can think of one test that occurs consistently and is easy to validate.
(Joking aside, I do think about the fact that I can detect soiled diapers as evidence that I can still smell just fine!)
"To ensure continued protection against harmful organisms, a certain amount of chlorine must remain in the water after treatment. The remaining chlorine is known as a residual chlorine. It is this tiny amount that you sometimes smell in your tap water."
"Can the COVID-19 virus spread through pools and hot tubs?
There is no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread to humans through the use of pools and hot tubs. Proper operation, maintenance, and disinfection (e.g., with chlorine and bromine) of pools and hot tubs should remove or inactivate the virus that causes COVID-19."
Chlorination is an interesting question. On the one hand, the paper says the researchers did tests of actual sewage and found it worked in practice. On the other hand, wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...) chlorine isn't generally added to the water supply in the Netherlands.
That's interesting, but how do you plan to sample microlitres of volume from thousands of gallons? At which physical location would would you take the sample?
I am baffled that even in the age of corona the author feels the need to begin a story about proposed vital monitoring methods with a vingette about his father. If the author discovers the secret to medical immortality, will the article he writes about it first tease us with a love story to hook our interest?
On the other side of the spectrum from people who don't care about people, are people who care about people so exclusively that they can't naturally spend any time thinking about material measures that might help people.
Yes, burying the lede was strange, but I'm glad he got in Danzig's theory that singing might be one of the ways that this thing spreads very effectively.
Anecdotal, but someone very close to me who works on machinery realized one day that he could not smell gasoline at all. A few days later, he tested positive. It seems to be a good indicator for some.
I've been using zinc suckies as a form of prophylaxis against respiratory viruses for a while now. There's actually some research that suggests it's effective at preventing cold virus particles from attaching to and invading the throat, so it doesn't surprise me that it would also be effective against COVID-19 (which is kind of a super-Saiyan cold virus).
How often do you take them? I have some that advise to stop using after seven days, which leaves me wondering whether I should take them as a precaution or take them if I feel any early indicators of a virus. Also, I notice that they dry out my tongue.
Do you mind sharing how many mg (milligrams) of zinc are in the one you have which advises to limit use to 7 days? I noticed that the Mayo clinic site says the maximum dose per day for an adult is 40 mg. I'm curious whether this 40 mg is safe for indefinite use, or such a 40 mg limit would also be for a maximum of 7 days.
Could postcards with scratch and sniff actually be useful here?
If you just ask people about their sense of smell, I'm not sure they can give you a reliable answer. But maybe you could design a postcard to give them with a few numbered squares on it, and they could tell you whether they notice anything when they scratch each one of those. (It could be a blind test, too.)
Stick a URL or QR code on the postcard and you can collect the data.
The postcard could serve as both material for the experiment and advertisement. Mail them out to random people in an area you want to sample.
I've gotten these sorts of things in the mail as advertisements in the past, so obviously it's very feasible to produce them.
I don't have any proof I had it but I think I did around Valentine's day. It was very different from the type of smell loss from inflammation. I had no inflammation in my nose and could breathe through it fine, yet nothing. Usually with inflammation I can smell or taste if I sniff a bit. This was like a switch was turned off. I haven't had anything like it before. It took almost a week for it to start coming back. I thought it wasn't coming back that's how pronounced and strange it was.
Hendrik Streeck, the researcher who identified loss of smell and/or taste as a covid symptom in the first place, recently stated that it seems to occur primarily in the later stages of the disease (although he cautions that this has not yet been studied enough to be sure about it). So I'm not sure if this is really useful to track the disease.
Note that this article is about a corona symptom, Anosmia, not about the ability to smell patients. According to this [1] source, it only shows up in 30%-60% of cases.
