Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of when the global medical community received an alert about an unidentified cluster of a pneumonia-like illness that would later come to be known as COVID-19.
The real story yet to be told is how long before December 30, 2019 that the virus was actually circulating..
The SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST wrote this on December 31, 2019:
Hong Kong health authorities are taking no chances with a mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, warning of symptoms similar to Sars and bird flu as they step up border screening and put hospitals on alert.
“The situation in Wuhan is unusual, and we are not sure about the reasons behind the outbreak yet,” said Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said after an urgent night-time meeting with officials and experts on New Year’s Eve. “Since we are now in the holiday season, and Hong Kong has close transport ties with Wuhan, we must stay alert.”
While we need no reminder of how much this virus has affected our lives, they abound. Tomorrow as the clock strikes midnight, New York City will be without a crowd.. Times Square, for all is electric magnificence on New Years Eve, will be hushed.
This indeed has been the lost year. Funny, in a sense, how it all began.
The WHO telling the world there was no human to human transmission was one thing, but then government officials around the world saying not to wear masks as they were meaningless was another!
While so many argue about why science became political in 2020, it’s clear why.. because initially governments all took different courses of action, led with different agendas and mixed messages, and endured missteps in the long journey to the highly infectious December the planet is experiencing.
Seeds of confusion were planted early!
As the year ended, just one year ago now, an “unidentified” virus was identified in Wuhan.
New Years celebrations ushered in the roaring 20s of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, backstage, officials were scrambling for answers.
Scientific American reported this during the initial days:
The cause of mysterious pneumonia cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan remains unknown, health authorities in the city said Sunday, as the number of infected people rose to 59 from 44 on Friday.
Seven of the sick are listed as critically ill, down from 11 on Friday. The number of close contacts of cases under medical observation has risen to 163.
Sunday’s statement, the third from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission about the incident, is the first to give information about when people became infected. The first person known to have become ill began to show symptoms on Dec. 12 and the last date of symptom onset among the sick was Dec. 29, the statement said.
But the rest of the press information aged even worse, a clear sign that early reports were taking what China was releasing as fact.
The report went on,
Preliminary investigations show no clear evidence of person-to-person spread of the infection, and no cases among health workers, the Wuhan authorities said. The latter fact is especially important. Infections among medical staff are common at the start of infectious diseases outbreaks, when health workers don’t know they need to take special precautions to protect themselves. “I would say that … given the dates that they have mentioned there and the fact that no health care workers have been infected would suggest it’s not transmitting efficiently in humans,” said Ralph Baric, who studies emerging viruses at the University of North Carolina.
Calling Ralph now!
One year later, in America along, someone is dying every three minutes of COVID in Los Angeles, and the United States is nearing 4,000 people dying of COVID ….. D A I L Y ! ! !
PLAGUE YEAR
It describes the early days of this just one year ago now and how the world publicly and private reacted.. You should really read the entirely of the article.. but a few snippets worth really taking in includes these:
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.. Gao started to cry and said, “I think we’re too late.”
Impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were the highlight of daily American news broadcasts.. meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell announced, “In the morning, there will be a coronavirus briefing for all members at ten-thirty.” This was the first mention of COVID in Congress.
During the briefing, health authorities were reassuring. Redfield said, “We are prepared for this.”
One majorly important part of the article was when exactly the virus began to spread..
Perhaps Gao had just been made aware that the virus had been circulating in China at least since November. Certainly, Redfield didn’t know that the virus was already present in California, Oregon, and Washington, and would be spreading in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Michigan, and Rhode Island within the next two weeks—well before America’s first official case was detected.
THE EARLY GAME
Italy was one of the harder hit nations in 2020… And there were early reports that the plague year may have began earlier than thought.
REUTERS reported on the possible early game in an article this year:
Italian researchers are looking at whether a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 may be a signal that the new coronavirus might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought. Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist and medical statistics professor at the University of Milan, said there had been a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in the areas of Milan and Lodi between October and December last year.
He told Reuters he could not give exact figures but “hundreds” more people than usual had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 in those areas – two of Lombardy’s worst hit cities – with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died.
The first strange pneumonia case could have occurred in November 2019 in Italy BEFORE China.
Meanwhile back in the United States–way back–in September 2019, there was a rapid rise of Pneumonia … they were blamed on vaping. Health officials at that the time didn’t know what was causing them..
Before that, deadly germ research was shut down at Ft. Dietrich over safety concerns.. the United States was not in danger, public statements said.. but details were not released due to national security.. In 2020, it was revealed as to what the serious violations were..
Some other news to recall…
A NEW JERSEY mayor claimed he had COVID in November 2019.. the media at the time called his claim unfounded. “I was definitely feeling sick when I was there, and fought my way through it,” he told NJ Advance Media on Thursday. After returning home Nov. 21 from the convention, Melham said a doctor diagnosed his worsening symptoms — including a 102-degree fever, chills, hallucinations and a sore throat that ended up lasting for three weeks — as a bad case of the flu. “I have never been sicker in my entire life,” Melham said, though he acknowledged that he did not have the respiratory problems often associated with the coronavirus.
NEWSWEEK reported that some scientists said outbreaks started as early as September 2019! Based on the data Forster and his colleagues have collected, the coronavirus outbreak appears to have started between September 13 and December 7. “This assumes a constant mutation rate, which is admittedly unlikely to be the case, and the time estimate could therefore be wrong,” he told Newsweek. “But it is the best assumption we can make at the moment, pending analysis of further patient samples stored in hospitals during 2019.”
ABC NEWS reported that intelligence was looking at a spreading virus in November 2019. “”The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.””
A report in September 2019 talked about interesting symptoms of the vaping epidemic.. Respiratory symptoms reported by patients included shortness of breath, pain associated with breathing and a cough. Other symptoms included fever, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, the release said. But the cases displayed “no clear infectious cause and all required hospitalization.”
In October 2019, the Wuhan Games could have been a way the virus spread all over the world. Athletes who participated from other nations—both U.S. allies like France and Italy and adversaries like Iran—have reported suffering from COVID-19 symptoms. Some Iranian athletes died from COVID-19, including some who were in Wuhan, according to news reports not verified by Tehran.
And finally…
Dr Li Wenliang was an active user of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, over the past 10 years. He posted his last words on February 1: “Today the nucleic acid test result turns positive,” he wrote of the test that confirmed he had Covid-19. “The dust has settled, and the diagnosis is finally confirmed.”
One later later, some in China are still taking to the net to admire and honor him … despite the government’s watchful eye…
