zlacker

>>option+(OP)
At the end of December 2019, A friend had a layover in the business lounge in Seattle on a return flight from Europe to San Francisco. At the same time, a direct flight from Wuhan came in. He spent 3 hours in the lounge waiting for the flight to SFO, ate at the buffet.

A few days later, he said he became deathly sick. Fever, coughing, and said he felt like he was going to die. His wife became very sick shortly after his illness began, and his 8 year old son as well. His symptoms did not completely clear up for him for a month. His wife was seeing one specialist after another for months with after-effects. His son got through it in 3 days.

All of this was before the first cases was officially reported by the CDC as diagnosed in Seattle on January 20th.

My friend's doctors did not know what they were dealing with at the time and did not test for COVID. After COVID became known, he looked into anti body tests. They were expensive ($700+ at that time) and he did not have one.

>>11thEa+O5
There are a lot of anecdotal stories like these, but the idea that Covid was circulating widely in the US before January just isn't consistent with the evidence on the ground. Trevor Bedford has written about this several times [1], and he would know, the phylogenetic work he and his team have been doing is one of the most sensitive instruments we have in figuring out how this thing spreads.

So this basically boils down to who to trust, your friend's uncle who works at Nintendo, or a highly regarded evolutionary biologist.

[1]: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321

>>raphli+s6
He's not suggesting that it was widely circulating in the U.S. He's suggesting that someone coming off a flight from Wuhan might have passed it to him. At the end of December, we know for certain that there were numerous cases in Wuhan, so it's entirely possible that he caught it, passed it to his family, but they never infected anyone else.

Now would I bet on this? No, but it is entirely possible without resorting to anything that's not established scientific fact.