>Li Jifeng, a doctor at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital where the two people sought treatment, wrote on WeChat, a social media platform, that the patients sought treatment on Nov. 3
>“After so many years of specialist training, I’m familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of most respiratory diseases,” wrote Dr. Li. “But this time, I looked and looked at it. I couldn’t guess what pathogen caused this pneumonia. I only knew it was rare.”
At most it might have been a precursor to SARS-Cov-2, but it's unlikely to be the same agent. We've seen how wildly virulent that variant is; there's no way I can see that that virus could have been found in the wild in a city like Beijing and not cause the same problems we saw in Wuhan two months later.
This makes sense if the disease propagates linearly like bacteria on a petri dish. But it probably doesn't. It may spread more like a wildfire -- there can be burning branches blown miles from the main fire that only smolder or set a small patch of grass burning which flames out due to lack of fuel. Meanwhile the main fire is only stopped by water or other major geographic feature.
I could see it as possible. The spread is asymmetric. You could have one infected person who is not a super spreader only infect a few other people who just happen to be asymptomatic and not spread it to others. When your overall infected population is very small, like in the beginning of a jump from animals to humans, then you have a chance to get lucky in this way. Once you get to a larger infected population (like dozens of people) then you're more likely to have a super spreader and less likely to get lucky with only contacting asymptomatic people.
There are back-confirmed cases of covid in Italy in September 2019, so the Wuhan incident is definitely not a patient-0 situation (even if it could be a ground-0 location from previous patient-0 situation, but its just a guess and we'll never know).
Given that, having a case in Beijing in November 2019 is entirely plausible
Following that train of thought, what changed between Italy/Beijing and Wuhan? Was it sheer luck that made the first major outbreak happen in Wuhan, and not in Milan or Beijing? Or Los Angeles for that matter, I think I heard reports of suspect pneumonia cases from the US as well?
What I was alluding to with "precursor" was that it may have been the same virus, but that some mutation in Wuhan might have made it so much easier to spread. My mind just has trouble imagining a model where a virus can lie pretty much dormant for half a year in different populations, and then surge in one place only and spread from there. That may well be a limitation of my mind, I simply don't see how that would work.
If you have a deck with 2 hearts and 10 spades, your first flip could very well be a heart, even if with enough flips, 10/12 are spades.
What I mean by this is that viruses may have arbitrary behaviour when the infected population is small. Let's say as of September 2019, five people in the world were infected with COVID. It's actually not improbable or crazy that the epidemic outbreak only started in Dec/Jan.
I remember someone made a joke about how there were pandemics in 1920, 1820 and 1720, and another user commented that there is a weird flu in some Chinese city. This was either in the last week of 2019 or very early 2020.
Yes I remember a friend who lives in Hong Kong posting a news article (from a Chinese news source) describing a "mystery pneumonia" the first or second week of December 2019. He hypothesized that it was because of bushmeat. I think the news article got scrubbed. I wish I had saved it.
It made some news, it was suspicious cases of pneumonia in china. First time I read the article, I was like "uh oh". It did not make the headlines though, but it was still noticeable. I think I spotted it on reddit or hackernews. Maybe the article was on BBC? BBC has quite a good world coverage.
I guess you can google news by year. I'm very certain those articles exist. Next time I heard about it, it was getting much worse.
True, but between actually seeing the first news and figuring out: "Oh my God, this is going to be a global pandemic!", it took me a while. I think most people were in the same boat.
My wife had taken a couple infectious diseases courses as part of her anthropology degree so she was tuned into this whole thing and the first article she read about it end of December I remember her freaking out. "Oh, great, another SARS-type virus has been found, we're screwed" and me being like "honey, you're being paranoid. relax."
Some months back, I had the same recollection: an article about suspicious pneumonia cases in China published by the BBC sometimes in December. I did some searching, and nothing, I think the first article is from the 31st of December. Funny how the mind can trick you, maybe it is linked to "Déjà vu" [1].
I journal daily and like to capture the news among my daily record. The first time I found COVID/Coronavirus mentioned by BBC News was January 3rd 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025.
It is of course possible I missed a story but before January 3rd there was little to no mainstream news coverage. It is quite frustrating to find accurate articles now as many sites are falsely returned in date range Google searches. All "mystery flu-like pneumonia" stories I've found reported in December 2019 are medical news so it is extremely unlikely someone would come across such an article as part of normal news reading.
On January the 4th their were posters (printed A4) up on Public Transport in Hong Kong. I remember thinking it was very strange - I had heard a story on the BBC world service the night before. The posters warned of a "Novel Pneumonia from Southern China". How the world changed...
How it changed indeed! Reading my journal for the first four months of 2020 is fascinating. I must have read over those first few months ten times since. So much has happened with advice and guidance changing as we learn more about the virus and the disease. So much mis- and disinformation. Crazy behaviours all over. I am so glad I keep a journal as it will be quite something to read back in a decade or two.
Especially for my 8 year old son. He is old enough to understand things are not normal but young enough to not fully understand the gravity of the situation or have memories of much outside of his little bubble.
If you can get access to an archive of South China Morning Post that hasn't been scrubbed, the term you want to search for is "mystery pneumonia" or "sars like".
Thanks, I have several Chinese/Asia news sources from December however I was asking for a BBC reference as M2Ys4U mentioned it was reported by the BBC on New Years Eve and the earliest I have is January 3rd.
According to Giuseppe Remuzzi there were strange pneumonia cases in northern Italy in November 2019, but as far as I can see they were not reported until March 2020.
Apart from that I remember the first reports from China in December 2019.
I remember hearing about it prior to that as well. I remember because I was building a shed and had someone helping me who was talking about it and it was prior to the new year, early December at the latest. He heard about it on a Doomsday type podcast.
This reminds me that I first read about early cases of covid around october or november 2019.