alt Hacker NewsYa know, I could have sworn I remember reading a little bit about COVID in Nov of 2019, but my recollection doesn’t line up with the Wikipedia timeline. I remember being nervous around campus at the time… although there were some other pretty bad colds going around that year, so maybe I just got mixed up.
I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?
Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.
Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.
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2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.
You probably did, but it wasn't called CoVID back then. I remember I had Chinese coworkers who were already forced to quaranteen when they went home around late Dec 2019.
In the beginning nobody knew what it was and it went through some name changes over the first few months. It the beginning (from what I remember) it was nCov19 (as in Novel Coronavirus). Eventually people figured out it was an off-shoot of SARS-Cov (from 2004) so it settled as SARS-CoV-2 and the respective cluster of symptoms/disease as CoVID-19 (CoronaVirus Infectious Disease).
Nov sounds early but I was in China in oct-dec '19 and jan '20 and then it was definitely talked about a lot going to feb when I left (luckily and completely coincidental). I had to go on another business trip right after and returned, again completely coincidental (I was an idiot in hindsight), just 2 days before my country fully locked down. On that last trip I contracted covid which gave me an annoying couch.
Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.
Dec 2019 is when I first read something on reddit about it, I remember thinking "oh, SARS is coming back".
I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).
The first ive heard of it was a wave of sickleave traversing through the machine integrator community ,many of them travelling back from the coast. Oh and then adv china.
yeah the time line was never quite right for me either. I had a coworker get a "corona virus" in dec / jan and it was the first time I had ever heard of such a thing. It was just like "Did you hear about xyz hes in the hospital with a corona virus." This was in the US for context.
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First case in December 2019. February 2, 2020 fogging machines on city streets in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdwCdyiDCw
We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.
January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.
Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472