Reports like this remind me of very early COVID days. And USA just elected a POTUS that did a shit job of getting us through that same pandemic. With the cabinet that he has (rfk jr, oz…), let’s just hope these are truly fringe cases and doesn’t lead to an outbreak
Don't worry, we're unlikely to know whether that's the case anyway. All we'll have is word of mouth to augment suppressed (or never collected) data, which is just the same as the problem not existing!
Ya know, I could have sworn I remember reading a little bit about COVID in Nov of 2019, but my recollection doesn’t line up with the Wikipedia timeline. I remember being nervous around campus at the time… although there were some other pretty bad colds going around that year, so maybe I just got mixed up.
I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?
Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.
Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.
We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.
January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.
Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"
2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.
The first ive heard of it was a wave of sickleave traversing through the machine integrator community ,many of them travelling back from the coast. Oh and then adv china.
Nov sounds early but I was in China in oct-dec '19 and jan '20 and then it was definitely talked about a lot going to feb when I left (luckily and completely coincidental). I had to go on another business trip right after and returned, again completely coincidental (I was an idiot in hindsight), just 2 days before my country fully locked down. On that last trip I contracted covid which gave me an annoying couch.
Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.
It is funny, I guess it is it uncommon at all given the nature of a, well, pandemic. But you got it so early. I dodged the thing for like two and a half years I think. Our experiences were so different, haha.
Did you get out much, being immune and all?
I guess it’s somehow just occurring to me that, despite this giant shared experience that we all had as a society, a lot of us had it in totally different ways.
My big mistake was ignoring all the (growing) news that this was bad; my last business meetings where in very busy spaces and so where my wife's meetings. So we both had it early.
We weren't allowed to go out very far, it was a weird time, but luckily we live in the countryside and not in a city so not too much change besides police blockades to stop you from venturing too far.
Dec 2019 is when I first read something on reddit about it, I remember thinking "oh, SARS is coming back".
I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).
Probably not block CDC scientists of speaking about it[0]. Also not interfere with data collection by the CDC[1].
They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.
There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].
The premise here is that there would've been one. It is vaguely possible that since a Democrat wouldn't have defunded the US presence in the region, that it could've been contained. Not plausible really, but possible. That scenario would not have been (and was not) possible with the decisions that Republicans took in the lead up to the pandemic.
They’re just going to deny anything is wrong, sweep deaths under the rug and carry on with absolutely nonsensical “gut feel” reactions to real problems. Hell, didn’t Hegseth say he doesn’t even believe in germs and so he doesn’t wash his hands.
This is pretty clearly a joke: "Really, I don't really wash my hands ever. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they not real. I can't get sick."
Interesting, I didn’t know the context. They’re not blameless though, with all the conspiracies they’re in bed with it’s hard to tell what’s a joke anymore.
It's really concerning how the next 4 years in America will turn out; during his 1st term, along with some clowns, Trump at least picked some people who were pretty competent. This time, the competent people want nothing to do with him (and vice versa) and he's surrounded himself entirely with incompetent clowns.
Will there even be a flu shot next year with rfk jr. in charge of HHS? NIH formulates what goes into to the next year's flu vaccine in the spring and HHS is over the NIH.
It’s easy to subscribe to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency[0] and receive updates on cases of AI in livestock across the country. I was a subscriber for a year or so and thought it was fun but ultimately received too many emails — sometimes multiple cases a month. Not once did any of those get blown up to a media-worthy case, which I always found interesting: relatively high frequency but low severity.
I suppose the “severity” is low only because the rate of transmission to humans is low. The article mentions how we come into contact with wild animals especially birds more often than we might think. I wish they expanded on that — from touching things in public? from unwashed food? These aren’t wild populations of birds right?
Also gotta love the “we’re hoping no more transmissions occur and the mutation dies out” statement. I mean I don’t have a better plan.
> The USA re-elected the same idiot that worsened the outcome in US and globally.
This seems a-historic to me. The start of the lockdown in the US was as firm as Canada and most other western countries. Trump also funded Operation Warp Speed. Not saying he handled it perfectly, but as I recall the US had tests and vaccines available before we Canucks did.
The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020. I don't think any administration would be able to make it happen again without heavy use of force and considerable risk of social upheaval.
He did the one thing that was unambiguously, knowably, certainly incorrect, which was to slow down testing: https://youtu.be/Ti4sSRonNwY?t=27
And he did it because he didn't like "his numbers."
Lots of mistakes were made, some less excusable or more harmful than others, but this wasn't "a mistake." This was inarguably and knowably a selfish decision to put self above millions of Americans.
> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020
Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures. I don't put much stock in this. No matter how much togetherness rhetoric one threw at the problem the mistakes made in handling the pandemic, while understandable, emboldened and enabled forces that would result in an eventual backlash.
Witness Canada, where we had a government that constantly emphasized togetherness against a common threat, and yet we also got the trucker convoy. Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
> This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures.
No it doesn't it just depends on the "words the most important person in the world says matters in times of crisis" view of history.
> Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
I don't think "all of it" is the alternative. There has clearly been a groundswell of similar sentiments across the western world, but to suppose that the question of who is the US President is literally immaterial is frankly insane.
It's not immaterial, but the backlash to COVID measures went far beyond Trump's position on the matter. For example in 2022 Trump was still eagerly taking credit for Operation Warp Speed, while many of his most passionate supporters were saying things like "Trump is great, except for his position on the COVID vaccine."[1][2]
Sure, and think about how many more lives he could've saved if he came out more vocally in favor of it, and how many more lives he could've ended if he came out more vocally against it!
>> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020
> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
I don't agree with your implication, because I don't interpret the original statement the same way. The attitude was present, Trump turned into a cultural catastrophe. What political capital that remained was spent. We have less agreement now among the population as to what is acceptable and what is useful than before the last pandemic. The trenches have been dug, the no-man's land will be filled with mud and bodies.
Arguably the political capital was just incompetently set on fire.
I imagine a Reagan, or a Kennedy, or a Roosevelt in that situation, and for anyone with a good instinct for leadership it just becomes a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel setup for becoming an absolute legend. The populace was dying of thirst for leadership and unity, and they were given huge blocks of salt and turned on each other. The last time a leader was set up for such an easy approval ratings layup it was Bush post 9/11.
It's wild that the 2020 election wasn't a complete 1984-scale rout for the republicans. It should've been if they'd had an ounce of gravitas or the ability to lead.
In an alternative universe, Trump said something like, "Hey folks, I know wearing masks can be a bit unusual and uncomfortable at times, and we're not totally certain how effective they are, but there's good reason to believe they'll save the lives of some of our fellow Americans... please put them on when you're around other people, we'll re-assess as we get a better understanding of the cost-benefit tradeoff."
In that universe, we're not even toying with the idea that the American public would violently revolt at the idea of some basic mitigations of a respiratory epidemic.
I agree. And I think a lot of the most extreme backlash took off towards the end of the pandemic, when vaccine mandates became a thing. This was the moment where many people I know who were otherwise ok going along with many of the other measures started drawing a line and then began working backwards towards doubting everything else they had been told up to that point.
Notably, this was not Trump's fuckup.
And just to be clear about where I stand - I get the COVID booster together with a flu shot every fall now.
Russian national strategy for a long time[0] has been to sow domestic strife/fuel sectarianism by an available means, and politicizing vaccine hesitancy has been a wildly successful lever for them. They were definitely doing this even before Covid[1].
Let this post make you notice they have been working on an mRNA payload that supposedly provides immunity against this already, however they were working on a self-replication feature but they merged that branch beforehand so this new version will have multiple new features.
Reports like this remind me of very early COVID days. And USA just elected a POTUS that did a shit job of getting us through that same pandemic. With the cabinet that he has (rfk jr, oz…), let’s just hope these are truly fringe cases and doesn’t lead to an outbreak
Don't worry, we're unlikely to know whether that's the case anyway. All we'll have is word of mouth to augment suppressed (or never collected) data, which is just the same as the problem not existing!
https://youtu.be/Ti4sSRonNwY?t=27
Ya know, I could have sworn I remember reading a little bit about COVID in Nov of 2019, but my recollection doesn’t line up with the Wikipedia timeline. I remember being nervous around campus at the time… although there were some other pretty bad colds going around that year, so maybe I just got mixed up.
I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?
Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.
Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.
First case in December 2019. February 2, 2020 fogging machines on city streets in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdwCdyiDCw
We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.
January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.
Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472
2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.
The first ive heard of it was a wave of sickleave traversing through the machine integrator community ,many of them travelling back from the coast. Oh and then adv china.
Nov sounds early but I was in China in oct-dec '19 and jan '20 and then it was definitely talked about a lot going to feb when I left (luckily and completely coincidental). I had to go on another business trip right after and returned, again completely coincidental (I was an idiot in hindsight), just 2 days before my country fully locked down. On that last trip I contracted covid which gave me an annoying couch.
Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.
It is funny, I guess it is it uncommon at all given the nature of a, well, pandemic. But you got it so early. I dodged the thing for like two and a half years I think. Our experiences were so different, haha.
Did you get out much, being immune and all?
I guess it’s somehow just occurring to me that, despite this giant shared experience that we all had as a society, a lot of us had it in totally different ways.
My big mistake was ignoring all the (growing) news that this was bad; my last business meetings where in very busy spaces and so where my wife's meetings. So we both had it early.
We weren't allowed to go out very far, it was a weird time, but luckily we live in the countryside and not in a city so not too much change besides police blockades to stop you from venturing too far.
Dec 2019 is when I first read something on reddit about it, I remember thinking "oh, SARS is coming back".
I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).
[dead]
What would have a democrat president done different during the first year of the pandemic?
Probably not block CDC scientists of speaking about it[0]. Also not interfere with data collection by the CDC[1].
They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.
There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].
[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/trump-ad...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
[3] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-homeland...
[5] https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...
The premise here is that there would've been one. It is vaguely possible that since a Democrat wouldn't have defunded the US presence in the region, that it could've been contained. Not plausible really, but possible. That scenario would not have been (and was not) possible with the decisions that Republicans took in the lead up to the pandemic.
One lone case doesn't remind me of early covid. Many cases reminds me of early covid.
Though this case is concerning.
Cases were happening in China around Dec ‘19 and I was worried. Then a case in the US followed by “no reason to worry”. Then it spiraled.
They’re just going to deny anything is wrong, sweep deaths under the rug and carry on with absolutely nonsensical “gut feel” reactions to real problems. Hell, didn’t Hegseth say he doesn’t even believe in germs and so he doesn’t wash his hands.
This is pretty clearly a joke: "Really, I don't really wash my hands ever. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they not real. I can't get sick."
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1856494554624442433
And the Fox news hosts laughed at him! That's a good thing I suppose!
But seriously: God am I glad I don't watch all these kinds of shows. I'd be much more sad than I already am about the state of America.
Interesting, I didn’t know the context. They’re not blameless though, with all the conspiracies they’re in bed with it’s hard to tell what’s a joke anymore.
It's really concerning how the next 4 years in America will turn out; during his 1st term, along with some clowns, Trump at least picked some people who were pretty competent. This time, the competent people want nothing to do with him (and vice versa) and he's surrounded himself entirely with incompetent clowns.
Will there even be a flu shot next year with rfk jr. in charge of HHS? NIH formulates what goes into to the next year's flu vaccine in the spring and HHS is over the NIH.
So far, there's always a global pandemic whenever Trump is president.
It’s easy to subscribe to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency[0] and receive updates on cases of AI in livestock across the country. I was a subscriber for a year or so and thought it was fun but ultimately received too many emails — sometimes multiple cases a month. Not once did any of those get blown up to a media-worthy case, which I always found interesting: relatively high frequency but low severity.
I suppose the “severity” is low only because the rate of transmission to humans is low. The article mentions how we come into contact with wild animals especially birds more often than we might think. I wish they expanded on that — from touching things in public? from unwashed food? These aren’t wild populations of birds right?
Also gotta love the “we’re hoping no more transmissions occur and the mutation dies out” statement. I mean I don’t have a better plan.
[0] - https://notification.inspection.canada.ca/
I wonder if we'll be firing any more pandemic surveillance staffers like we did last time[1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...
[flagged]
> The USA re-elected the same idiot that worsened the outcome in US and globally.
This seems a-historic to me. The start of the lockdown in the US was as firm as Canada and most other western countries. Trump also funded Operation Warp Speed. Not saying he handled it perfectly, but as I recall the US had tests and vaccines available before we Canucks did.
The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020. I don't think any administration would be able to make it happen again without heavy use of force and considerable risk of social upheaval.
He did the one thing that was unambiguously, knowably, certainly incorrect, which was to slow down testing: https://youtu.be/Ti4sSRonNwY?t=27
And he did it because he didn't like "his numbers."
Lots of mistakes were made, some less excusable or more harmful than others, but this wasn't "a mistake." This was inarguably and knowably a selfish decision to put self above millions of Americans.
> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020
Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures. I don't put much stock in this. No matter how much togetherness rhetoric one threw at the problem the mistakes made in handling the pandemic, while understandable, emboldened and enabled forces that would result in an eventual backlash.
Witness Canada, where we had a government that constantly emphasized togetherness against a common threat, and yet we also got the trucker convoy. Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
> This kind of depends on the "great man" view of history where these figures have the kind of influence needed to move entire cultures.
No it doesn't it just depends on the "words the most important person in the world says matters in times of crisis" view of history.
> Some of this was probably cultural contagion from the US, but not all of it.
I don't think "all of it" is the alternative. There has clearly been a groundswell of similar sentiments across the western world, but to suppose that the question of who is the US President is literally immaterial is frankly insane.
It's not immaterial, but the backlash to COVID measures went far beyond Trump's position on the matter. For example in 2022 Trump was still eagerly taking credit for Operation Warp Speed, while many of his most passionate supporters were saying things like "Trump is great, except for his position on the COVID vaccine."[1][2]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-stopped-talking-operat...
[2] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/06/20/trump-i-dont-want...
Sure, and think about how many more lives he could've saved if he came out more vocally in favor of it, and how many more lives he could've ended if he came out more vocally against it!
He waffled, and his followers waffled too.
>> The real problem is that the political capital needed to get people to agree to something like lockdowns or wearing masks was all spent in 2020
> Let's not act like this attitude emerged out of thin air. Trump also had an opportunity to bring Americans together against a common threat, and he (and his lookalikes abroad) decided to turn it into the cultural catastrophe that you're now supposing was inevitable.
I don't agree with your implication, because I don't interpret the original statement the same way. The attitude was present, Trump turned into a cultural catastrophe. What political capital that remained was spent. We have less agreement now among the population as to what is acceptable and what is useful than before the last pandemic. The trenches have been dug, the no-man's land will be filled with mud and bodies.
> What political capital that remained was spent.
Arguably the political capital was just incompetently set on fire.
I imagine a Reagan, or a Kennedy, or a Roosevelt in that situation, and for anyone with a good instinct for leadership it just becomes a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel setup for becoming an absolute legend. The populace was dying of thirst for leadership and unity, and they were given huge blocks of salt and turned on each other. The last time a leader was set up for such an easy approval ratings layup it was Bush post 9/11.
It's wild that the 2020 election wasn't a complete 1984-scale rout for the republicans. It should've been if they'd had an ounce of gravitas or the ability to lead.
In an alternative universe, Trump said something like, "Hey folks, I know wearing masks can be a bit unusual and uncomfortable at times, and we're not totally certain how effective they are, but there's good reason to believe they'll save the lives of some of our fellow Americans... please put them on when you're around other people, we'll re-assess as we get a better understanding of the cost-benefit tradeoff."
In that universe, we're not even toying with the idea that the American public would violently revolt at the idea of some basic mitigations of a respiratory epidemic.
I agree. And I think a lot of the most extreme backlash took off towards the end of the pandemic, when vaccine mandates became a thing. This was the moment where many people I know who were otherwise ok going along with many of the other measures started drawing a line and then began working backwards towards doubting everything else they had been told up to that point.
Notably, this was not Trump's fuckup.
And just to be clear about where I stand - I get the COVID booster together with a flu shot every fall now.
Russian national strategy for a long time[0] has been to sow domestic strife/fuel sectarianism by an available means, and politicizing vaccine hesitancy has been a wildly successful lever for them. They were definitely doing this even before Covid[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/1952/
Let this post make you notice they have been working on an mRNA payload that supposedly provides immunity against this already, however they were working on a self-replication feature but they merged that branch beforehand so this new version will have multiple new features.
Finland started vaccinating people in its fur farms and bird rescue centres in June 2024. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"Gee all of the minks died. Maybe we should protect the humans?"
[dead]