destrekor
Lifer
- Nov 18, 2005
- 28,799
- 359
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Given current evidence on the circulation of COVID-19, I can pretty much guarantee that you didn't have it in Nov 2019.
How can you be so sure?
I too, along with family and some co-workers, experienced something quite like that in November-December 2019, and one co-worker seemingly had a second bout in January 2020. Covid-19 or not, I really just want to know what virus that was. Was it equally as novel but just kind of faded away or didn't become serious? Some new variant of rhinovirus or RSV? Heard it was a real bad RSV season back then, but normally like many viruses it doesn't often impact adults... like most coronaviruses don't cause much more than a common cold-like response in adults because they became exposed and developed some limited immunity as a child.
Now I mostly suspect you're hunch is accurate, but I don't know that I've seen anything that actually points to it being truly locked up in China until late-December 2019 or into January 2020. I mean yes the usual sources and discussions all are showing just that, but I don't know we can definitively pinpoint first transmission... first "known" case perhaps, but can we expect to be so lucky as to immediately find the virus right at the very moment it came into existence? Just like by time we finally identify new Covid-19 mutations, it's practically guaranteed that means it has been in circulation for some time already.
I generally believe the wet market theory but I don't expect investigators will find a complete picture thanks to China's obfuscation. Did it accidentally walk out of the Wuhan lab before winding up in the wet market, or did it truly evolve at the market end of story? I don't suspect we'll ever truly know.