flynnibus
Premium Member
Do we know with good certainty the guy in Washington state was the actual beginning for the outbreak in the US? Since it appears China wasn’t completely forthcoming with when it started there, is there any chance it actually started here in, say, November instead of January? Would that put us, on average because each state is a bit different, peaking now instead of 4-6 weeks, or whatever it is, from now? Just curious if anyone has any info on this.
It's possible there were cases before his... but it's not really a driving point in what is happening now. If a person (or even a few people) had the virus... but it didn't spread.. 'no harm, no foul'. It's the spreading of the virus that is what materially significant... not if there were isolated cases.
Since we know we didn't have the increase in identifiable symptoms and resulting hospitalizations.. and deaths.. it's reasonable to say we didn't have the spread at that time. The percentage of asymptomatic people, those needing treatment, and those dying, wouldn't have changed significantly from then to now. So if there was the spread going on... there would have been the hospitalizations and deaths to go along with it.
The fact we weren't having a sudden spike in cases... means we were not seeing tramission like we would expect to see if it were the coronavirus causing us problems now.
That's what all the conspiracies about "has this been here all along..." postulations gloss over or people going "oh I got sick in Jan and no one knew what it was.. maybe it was covid-19...". If it were here IN THIS FORM all along.. we would have had WORSE transmission than we are seeing now... and should have had similar downstream things... surges of people needing hospitalization, deaths, etc.
If ANOTHER form of the virus was already here... as long as that strain didn't mutate into what we have now... it's immaterial. And the scientists are able to trace the strains to know if something is a continuity or not.