UKH

A case of coronavirus has been confirmed in France in December, the man has no idea how he got it and had not left the country.

Coronavirus: France's first known case 'was in December' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52526554

Maybe it has been in the UK longer than we think?

A lot of people think it has been in the UK since Jan / end of last year. I heard that it was confirmed in the US since very early January. It was likely been spreading in the hardest hit countries - US, France, UK, Italy and Spain much longer than the official line given how many more people have died in those countries compared to other countries where it seemingly has not proliferated nearly as much (the line that its down to brilliant leadership in those countries does not sound especially plausible).

Personally in retrospect I think I got it mid January - heavy fever, coughing etc...

I’m hoping there’s enough in the sample to fully sequence it.  Personally and through UKC I know people who had very similar symptoms in early January and I could be convinced it was here then except for one thing - why was there no explosive growth in cases back then?  I’ve wondered before if this was an earlier version before some mutation that made it highly infectious.  

I had dismissed as flu the heavy cough (+ fever, in his case only) picked up by me a mate in a ski resort in late January. Yes Ischgl, the ski plague resort! Too soon. And where were the European deaths in January?

However, this story does make me wonder about mutation.

Yes, the lack of exponential growth back then is odd. As you say, a mutation?

I had an odd cough type thing at the end of Jan too. It was a dry, hacking cough. Very painful. I didn't have a fever but did have a very elevated resting heart rate, horrible headache and really fatigued. I was calling it a cold, but I wasn't particularly snotty. It wiped me out for a couple of weeks. It could fit with a milder case of it.

But no one else around me caught it. So if it was it, why didn't they get it? I haven't been abroad anywhere, but working in a climbing wall I will have been in touch with plenty who had been.

With a virus like this a small proportion of people with Covid are responsible for a large proportion of the transmission. Also known as “superspreaders”.

So it is in fact very likely that before exponential growth starts, you get quite a few cases that don’t lead to much forward transmission because you havent created or imported the  superspreaders who are necessary for the spread of the virus to reach full potential.

This also means that any exit strategy will need to focus quite a lot of on those superspreaders. It is also emerging as one of the reason wearing masks in the community seem to work.

I'd always assumed that super spreaders referred to people who travel around a lot whilst contagious but what you've written implies that may not be the whole story. I assumed that the R0 number was consistent across the population but I hadn't questioned that assumption. I've read a bit about super spreaders but haven't found anything about their absence possibly being a factor with the early stages of an epidemic not going exponential. Do you have any references? I would like to read more. Thanks

Lots of potential factors in play - have a look at this paper:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15962218/

it looks at the epidemiology of the 68/69 Hong Kong flu, very variable by nation, also very fast global spread even back then.

I'm no expert but it feels like this story is placing a lot of weight on a single swab. How certain can we be that it hasn't been contaminated since it was originally taken? My understanding is that the PCR tests can pick up on tiny traces of relevant DNA. It's certainly interesting and worthy of further study but I'm not sure anyone should now be very confident that the cough they had back in December was coronavirus.

There was folk on here a few months ago saying that people who said they’d had it in early Jan/December as talking rubbish! 

People were saying it was unlikely based on the low hospital usage and lack of deaths. Especially given how many people were claiming they had it it really should be widespread very early on. Mutation was given as one possibility.

There are various bugs going around most winters which a reasonable number of people will suffer from some more serious than others. The difference this year is people are more likely to remember it and talk about it.

Almost certainly, probably multiple people who didn't even go to the doctor.

I'll own up to being one of them. I think I said it's far more likely to be something else and I think that's probably still true. At that stage Covid would have been outnumbered by other bugs.

the reason I remember what I had was it is the first time I actually gave up on the idea I'd recover from an illness and also it has left me with impaired breathing.

I probably would have forgotten the alarming other symptoms I'd never had with a chest infection before.  But not how long it went on and the state it's left me in which never lets me forget it, whatever it was I got at the beginnng of December.  And I've never experienced a total lack of coordination during walking/scrambling in the Lakes as I tried when I thought I was recovering.  It was like being at 4000m unacclimatised, take a step or two, rest, panting session, then another.  And having to watch foot placement on something as easy as Swirral Edge due to my legs not seeming to be under my control

Whatever it was it wasn't like anything else I've had and I've had some nasty bouts of flu over the years.

In the early stages (one or a few infected) it won't be exponential, it will be more lumpy and random as it will depend on which grandchild gets a cuddle from which grandparent or which extrovert/introvert gets infected. When more people (*tens?) are infected all that averages out into something that looks exponential.

*humans start to look pretty average when you have 20-50 people, if it's determined by fewer superspreaders you might need tens of superspreaders for it to average out.

Great news for the parental generation of a certain age who are constantly blaming China for this.  If they can add France to the blame list as well, that's birthday + Christmas

It's not that super spreaders are required for it to go exponential, but that they have a higher R0 than everyone else; so it could have been growing at a slow exponential with results too small to notice until one super spreader got infected, then the exponential rate kicks up a level etc.

There were also people on here saying this was all a storm in a teacup, Michale Barrymore's swimming pool had killed as many people as Covid, that we were in no way going to follow the same route as Italy, and that bananas are marsupials.

Given the number of university students who travel between home in Wuham province and the UK around Christmas I would be amazed if it hadn't been here undetected from early January.  As I've said before, university students are young and low risk and tend to live in a university bubble; many of the staff they interact with are young, living far away from their parents and socialising little during term time.  So spread could have been relatively contained in relatively symptomatic people during flu seasons - masking things. 

At this point we'll probably never know.  As someone else on the thread mentioned, PCR is very contaminant sensitive so a single result on an old swab is a bit sketchy.  Good enough to convict people for murder mind...

isn't that more to do with mental incapacity rather than being a certain age?

It doesn't matter if it was here in late December as it never led to an outbreak back then. In the initial stages, after it takes off, the path in western countries is remarkably similar. The French outbreak may have gone nowhere, it may have mutated, it still may not even have been covid 19 (false positive). Its not unlikely  for someone to have arrived showing symptoms in Europe earlier than thought, as people had died in China by the second week of January and the earliest known case was from November. The world is so highly connected.

On the subect of coronaviruses there are many, including several common cold varieties, MERS and SARS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

My wife and I had a bad cough in late December,which lasted weeks and initially kept us bedbound, my wife had some difficulty breathing. Some of our friends (all 60s and 70s) had similar. I was someone who scoffed at earlier threads about CV in UK in January. I'm still very dubious, but not quite so certain. An antibody test, of the type Porton Down use, on a few people who are convinced they had early CV might answer this question, but perhaps its just academic at present.

I know little of virology or epidemics, but I do remember a lecture at uni in the early 70s about repeated failures over several years when they tried to introduce myxomatosis in Australia to control the devastating rabbit population. They had a little success but the disease always died out. Then when success came it had a huge effect and economic benefit that lasted years, until rabbits developed widespread immunity. Apparently the Australians have since introduced a different virus.

I just googled an article on this: https://csiropedia.csiro.au/myxomatosis-to-control-rabbits/   It didn't quite explain the repeated failures (for me) but environmental factors ,including mosquitoes, were suggested. (Perhaps unlikely to have been the reason for the success of myxamatosis in the UK though.)

All my rambling is just to say it seems a lot is unknown about why a viral disease suddenly becomes epidemic.

If you want to read more I’d suggest the rules of contagion by Adam kucharski

I was in Turin in December and took the start of a bad cough that lasted months. Others I had no contact with reported something with similar symptoms from earlier in November. I have no expectation it has anything to do with Covid 19. There are so many varied infections about why would I?

There was something widespread going around globally in December that manifested as a persistent long term cough - I got it in the UK in December and came back to Canada and lots of my climbing mates already had it - our climbing trips sounded like an away day from an 1800's TB sanatorium.  Given the transitivity of COVID-19 and what we're seeing now in terms of mortality, I would be frankly amazed that what people had was it and not just coincidental seasonal cold / flu.  

I had the December fevery cough. like a lot of people I wish it had been covid, but realistically,  it was flu. Lots of people I know had it, nobody wound up in hospital 

But also the super spreader in SARS travelled widely and attended 'mass' events.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

I will stick with that opinion. If all the people who think they had it early in the year had it, then it would've been picked up. It spreads quickly, and each person infects between 3-5 further people. It rips through households quickly. Given Christmas and New Year get-togethers there would have been a noticeable number of infections mid- January. Some of these would've presented to healthcare settings.

We were not picking up multiple unusual bilateral ("double") pneumonias on chest x-rays. We weren't sending people in with shortness of breath and picking up odd changes on chest CT scans. We weren't seeing increased numbers of people in their 40s on ITU. There were no reports of mass die-offs in care homes - all that would take is one relative going in with covid.

Flu (Influenza A) peaked at the end of December, so I'd quite happily bet that anyone with a flu-like illness in early Jan/December in the UK had flu. Other respiratory viruses were also available over the winter too. 

Ditto. It was the worst flu I've had, flattened me for a couple of months, but it wasn't Covid.