I keep hearing this. I also had the worst cold in 10 years easily, this january. My kids were unaffected but me and the wife had 40 deg fevers and muscle pains for days. The whole family took the seasonal flu vaccine (not sure if it was the correct one this year).
What seems to indicate that it wasn't Covid was that at the same time as all of us had that monster flu in january, the hospitals weren't filling up with people who couldn't breathe.
The hospitals are filling up with cases of viral pneumonia every year, at the beginning there would have been nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a bad flu season.
I think you're either missing or proving an implicit point.
I'll try to explain my reasoning:
- there are lots of ILI
- COVID-19 is a more severe ILI
- more severe ILI requires more hospital resources
- COVID-19 is an infectious disease, more disease, more infections
- depending on how much more severe COVID-19 is set to be, a conclusion can be drawn whether it was more or less likely that you had COVID-19 versus any other ILI based on increased hospital resource usage.
The important thing here is removing the perceived illness severity (i.e. worst flu ever, etc.) from the calculation, because it's highly subjective, as well of being a sample size of one.
The thing that usually happens is that someone writes that they had the worst flu ever, and soon somebody responds with something that they feel is relevant to the post, e.g. "I also had the worst flu ever", these comments often imply the possibility that their "worst flu" was their "COVID-19", which is exponentially less likely the closer to the start of the pandemic you go.
I'll call this phenomenon COVID-19+1 unless there's already a better name for it. And I won't claim immunity to it.
And by late February and early March when medical professionals were hunting for signs of the novel coronavirus and people were about to start being hospitalised and dying in large numbers, there'd be an enormous amount of hospital inpatients with respiratory symptoms to test. We know this wasn't the case until later...
That's a fallacy. At any point in time, there will be patients showing up with viral pneumonia in the hospitals, with some seasonal variance.
For there to be a discernible difference here, you need a "critical mass" of cases. How many such cases are necessary depends on the incidence of severe cases vs non-severe cases, but we do not know the amount of non-severe cases, because we did not test everyone.
Antibody studies suggest that there are 10x as many cases as reported. If that is true, then there could have been hundreds of thousands of cases that went undetected along with some more severe cases that were labeled as "viral pneumonia".
The different rates of infection in different countries may well have more to do with the amount of testing than the actual infection rate.
>it wasn't Covid was that at the same time as all of us had that monster flu in january, the hospitals weren't filling up with people who couldn't breathe.
Maybe there is a second actor there teaming with it
What seems to indicate that it wasn't Covid was that at the same time as all of us had that monster flu in january, the hospitals weren't filling up with people who couldn't breathe.