
A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January - __warcraft__
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/04/23/covid-infected-attendee-ces-tech-conference
======
cblum
Disclaimer: this is my own anecdote. I'm not trying to spread misinformation.
These are my personal opinions.

I think we'll eventually find out COVID-19 has been around way earlier in 2019
than we thought. I've seen both here on HN and elsewhere anecdotal reports of
people having a "flu like nothing before" in late 2019 and early 2020 _in the
US_. There's at least one report of Italian doctors seeing a "strange
pneumonia" in November
([https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coro...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coronavirus-
strange-pneumonia-seen-lombardy-november-leading)).

My own story is this. My wife went with her team to a Chinese karaoke bar here
in Seattle, in International District, in mid-November. Everyone fell very,
very sick (one person has a lingering dry cough to this day). Fever for days
on end, cough, etc. It seemed like the flu, except my wife and others claim it
just felt different from other times they had the flu.

I caught it from my wife, and it did feel different. I'd never had a fever run
for so long, and the way it progressed was just different. And the most
unusual thing was that it seemed to affect my heart. I take a beta blocker to
control frequent PVCs. But on the days immediately following "recovery" (by
which I mean no more fever), I just couldn't move around too much or my heart
would start throwing PVCs like crazy, as if I hadn't taken my meds. I was also
feeling very weak and faint, which never happened to me before (I'm usually
able to exercise just fine right after recovering from illness).

To add to the anecdote, our daughter caught it too but she just seemed to have
a mild cold, which also matches the majority of infant COVID-19 cases.

I hope serological tests become widely available, since I'm really curious to
know if I actually had it back then. Obviously in the mean time I'm not
assuming I did, and I'm staying home and avoiding all human contact I can.

~~~
nyczomg
Same disclaimer applies for my comment, and adding that I'll be throwing out
some of my own crackpot theories...

I'm in NYC, and am convinced my family had it in February. This leads me to
also wonder if it wasn't rampaging its way through NYC for months before we
had a confirmed case. My wife went to urgent care in tears because of
breathing problems, a fever, etc. All we know was it was not the flu or strep
and she eventually recovered. The rest of our family had at least mild
symptoms, and given how infectious it is - how would we not have gotten it
given we did no distancing whatsoever.

The thing I am trying to wrap my mind around, is that if it was so prevalent
before we knew about it - how did we not notices so many people dropping dead,
etc? I have two thoughts that I would love to explore more.

1\. We know about the placebo effect. Why would there not be a reverse placebo
effect for this virus? If my wife had been seeing non stop covid news in
February about how scary this disease is, why would she not start panicking,
having more breathing problems, worse symptoms, and maybe even take a turn for
the worse? If giving a sugar pill to someone and calling it medicine can
improve outcomes - surely watching dire cable news about how people with your
symptoms are dying left and right could do the opposite.

2\. Maybe those of us who got it early were lucky, because they just weren't
exposed over and over like people who finally got it in March/April.

If either or both of these things were true, then it could explain why/how the
fatality rate rose dramatically in March/April, which would explain better how
this could fly under the radar for so long, but be so prevalent.

And who knows - maybe someday I'll get a chance to take an antibody test and
will find that I'm wrong and my family just got hit with a bad cold.

~~~
izend
Three reasons to why it may not have been "noticed":

1\. Early on it had only spread in a small percentage of the populace so the
absolute number of deaths was too low to be noticed.

2\. The deaths from the regular flu this year were very low, see:
[https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-
maps/)

3\. The antibodies test out of Europe and NYC are pointing to an IFC around
0.35-0.6 which could "only" be 3-6x the bad 2017 flu season, note Covid19 is
still the worse pandemic in decades.

~~~
cblum
I'm sorry, what is IFC?

~~~
izend
Sorry IFR, infected fatality rate instead of case fatality rate (which is
usually confirmed cases)

------
buzzert
To explain the cavalier attitude expressed by people with symptoms: the “CES
Flu” is a real thing. I’ve gone 11 years in a row now, and either me or my
brother usually catches it every year. Something about thousands of
international visitors in the same space, touching all the same things I
guess.

Interestingly, I took a really proactive approach this year with liberal hand
sanitizer usage and neither of us got sick!

~~~
chx
Drupal Flu too. DrupalCon, an event with just a few thousand attendees
practically always spread illness. Read
[https://groups.drupal.org/node/294978](https://groups.drupal.org/node/294978)
this post from 2013, it'll be eerily familiar:

> Learn to wash your hands properly. We all think we know how to wash our
> hands, but most of us don't. Really.

> Wash your hands regularly, especially after lots of handshaking (Some people
> even wish we could avoid shaking hands), or handling money — and always
> before eating.

> Don't touch your face, especially your eyes, nose or mouth.

Really, covid instructions are nothing new.

~~~
geerlingguy
I've personally gotten the 'Drupal Flu' twice, there are just so many surfaces
and items that multiple people (often hundreds) touch including elevator
buttons, door handles, coffee carafes, stuff on vendor tables, etc. — even if
you are diligent in washing hands and trying to avoid rubbing eyes, etc., it
doesn't take much.

It's telling that usually one or two vendors have a freebie that consists of
some sample-size medication and vitamin packs.

------
bwooceli
Color me deeply skeptical. All the data we see out of "real" hotspots like New
York seem to show a fairly clear progression on infection rate, days-to-show-
symptoms, days-to-go-south, and days-to-die. If ConFlu was Covid, we would
have seen a much more clear connection and growth. I would expect for Nevada
to have been in a New York scenario.

~~~
netsharc
Huh, what percentage of the CES visitors are natives? They probably got the
virus but went home before they got sick...

~~~
bwooceli
I'm more thinking of the hospitality industry workers (high proportion of
residents) as a vector for local outbreak.

------
SketchySeaBeast
I'm not saying this isn't COVID, it sounds like it might very well have been,
but isn't "picking up the con crud" a stereotype of all conventions?

~~~
riffic
I'm amazed (not surprised however) that this neologism is at least a decade
old:

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=con%20crud](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=con%20crud)

edit: of course there's a 1995 citation from Usenet:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:con_crud](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:con_crud)

------
butler14
Isn't it considerably more likely that the flu they all had from CES was...
well... the flu? Given January is the tail-end of flu season?

~~~
__blockcipher__
Incidentally I’ve noticed tons of people talking about having come down sick
at the beginning of January in the US and assuming they must have had covid.
It’s like people forgot how many different respiratory infections are out
there.

~~~
toyg
We’ve gone from “covid19 is just a flu” to “the flu was really covid19
!!11!!”.

It will take years of research to untangle truth from “feelings”.

------
ejstronge
Retrospective antibody testing should be viewed carefully, given the
relatively low specificity (i.e., high rate of false positives).

If there’s a high clinical suspicion (could be relevant in this case, though
it may also represent the normal flu), the utility of the testing improves.

~~~
hashmymustache
Where are you getting low specificity for antibody tests? Most I’ve seen are
98+% with lower sensitivities.

~~~
ejstronge
Ah, I'd be quite interested seeing your 98+% specificity antibody!

Looking at the three out of four FDA EUA-approved serology tests (see
[https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-
med...](https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-medical-
devices/emergency-use-authorizations#covid19ivd)) most do not report
sensitivities up to 98%, with the notable exception of Ortho Vitro, though the
diversity of the samples they test isn't described.

1\. Cellex -
[https://www.fda.gov/media/136625/download](https://www.fda.gov/media/136625/download)

2\. Ortho Vitros -
[https://www.fda.gov/media/136967/download](https://www.fda.gov/media/136967/download)

3\. Chembio -
[https://www.fda.gov/media/136963/download](https://www.fda.gov/media/136963/download)

------
saurik
I went to CES this year, and a week and a half after (a typical incubation
time for Covid-19) I started coming down with a strange lower respiratory
illness that involved joint aches (my sacroiliac joint in particular, which I
think I had stressed horribly the past year, suddenly became excruciatingly
painful as I got sick to the point where I couldn't sleep), and intense on/off
fevers/chills that lasted way longer than I am used to... and yet my cough was
unproductive, I had _no_ sinus or other involvement (which I _always_ get),
and I simply didn't have any other symptoms I am used to with a flu; it
essentially seemed like "pneumonia maybe but with the wrong progression".

Regardless, I was knocked out for a while due to the fevers and lack of sleep.
When I was just sort of getting better, I was visited by a coworker who, two
weeks after he saw me for a day--and he notably spent most of that day with
me, including multiple meals: we are two people at the top of a small company
and I had been sick a while, so we had a lot to catch up on)--got sick with
what we later determined _was_ Covid-19 by positive test (but like, weeks
later, at which point I hadn't been sick for a long long time, so there seemed
no point in trying to use a viral test on me).

FWIW, we have good alternative explanations for where he got Covid-19, where I
got sick with a shorter incubation time (involving me getting very little
sleep while traveling to a handful of back-to-back events), and why I had
joint pains (a particular series of flights and car trips that were similar to
what I think first caused me issues a year ago... I didn't understand this
until a month later, btw: I am changing my style and quantity of travel); but
I really wish it were easy for me to quickly get an antibody test to see
whether I have already had this (though that still won't ever tell me for sure
as I could have had an asymptomatic case more recently... _le sigh_ ).

~~~
acolumb
I was in Seattle (where it supposedly entered the US) in mid-December and got
pretty much the same symptoms as you, _a week and a half after_!

Everyone else on the trip was sick, too.

I've never had the flu.

------
jedimastert
I know that "con flu" is mostly anecdotal, but a preponderance of evidence is
still a preponderance of evidence, and quite litterally every person person
I've known that regularly goes to conferences and conventions has not only
heard of con flu, but has _had_ it on more than one occasion. It's absolutely
a thing.

------
mudil
I came back from CES to home in Eugene, OR, and fell ill. I missed 10 days of
work. I am an anesthesiologist, and I knew that I have a viral illness (high
fever, myalgias, SOB, etc). At the time I tested negative for influenza.
Interestingly, I've been in a quarantine for a month. And I wore N95 for two
weeks prior to the quarantine, because of my super paranoid wife. So if I can
get tested for antibodies, it will be almost certainly CES, if I am positive.

------
searine
This is a fascinating article. To retrospectively test attendees might shed a
lot of light on the early spread.

