coldfish wrote:Dresden wrote:Not to beat a dead horse, but there is not "overwhelming scientific evidence" of this. The titles to two of the articles you posted say it "may" have or was "likely" here in December. That's quite a bit short of "overwhelming evidence" when they qualify it like that.
And while there is some evidence pointing to that possibility, if that was true, you'd have to explain why, if it was present earlier, no one detected that it was a novel coronavirus at that time? We've seen how badly it devastated nursing homes when it arrived in NY and Boston in Feb-Mar of 2020. If it had really been circulating widely before that time, why didn't we see the same sort of spike in nursing home deaths back in December, or earlier?
There is a lot we don't know about when and where and how it originated. Maybe one day they will sort this out, maybe we will never know.
Here is another one:
The coronavirus may have infected a small number of people in the United States as early as Dec. 13, more than a month earlier than researchers had thought, according to scientists who analyzed blood samples taken from American Red Cross donations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/health/coronavirus-december-arrival.htmlThere are countless other examples but there is no amount of scientific data I can show you to change your mind so I'm not going to bother. Regardless, whenever someone has objectively gone back and done a scientific study they find evidence that global spread started in December. It wasn't last September or this January. Very consistently, around the planet, the data points to December.
And this isn't some small data sample. Many countries have done it and when they do, they get the same result.
And another point- China is condemned for not realizing there was a new corona virus afoot sooner than when it was announced on Dec. 31st, but you could ask the same question about these other places where it supposedly was active, such as LA or Italy. Why didn't they start doing some forensic research on the spike in pneumonia cases they were seeing? Apparently all it took in China was one blood sample being sent to specialty lab to discover the presence of Covid 19- so why wasn't that done in these other places?
https://komonews.com/news/coronavirus/seattle-flu-study-allegedly-tested-samples-for-covid-19-against-federal-state-guidelinesThis is a local doctor who started testing for Covid on her own in Washington state very early on. She found it. When she notified authorities, their response wasn't to investigate. It was the same as China's. They shut her down and threatened her.
I can post anecdotal stories from Italy along the same vein.
This is a massive global screw up. Just because China screwed up, it doesn't absolve Trump of his mistakes or the CDC of theirs. People are acting like Trump here and trying to treat it like a political problem to shift blame. If we don't admit reality and try to fix the real problems, we are doomed to repeat them.
Coldfish- I don't really have a horse in this race- if the evidence eventually points to an earlier circulation of Covid globally before the conventionally accepted timeline, I won't dispute it. I just don't think we have that evidence yet.
The Seattle article you linked to says that samples were taken starting in December for a flu study. It then says that:
"The New York Times has reported that Chu and her staff began running tests of the flu samples before the lab was certified to do so and during a time when the testing procedures were not certified as well.
But in doing so, it detected participants that had presumptive tests for Covid-19 including a teenager at a Renton area high school. The school closed for a time as a precaution."
The article doesn't say when this high school student was tested. It could have been December, it could have been January. It's not clear when that happened. It does indicate it was before the generally accepted first case of Wash St. was declared, but it doesn't say how much earlier.
And the study (or the Covid testing part of it), was shut down because they didn't have authorization to test for Covid. Which I agree does sound fishy, but probably isn't part of a govt scheme to silence the doctors, but just regulatory nonsense about wanting to make sure standards were being following.
And in The NY Times article about antibodies being picked up in December, it also mentions that
"At least one prominent virus researcher was wary of how the findings were interpreted online and in news reports. Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who has been deeply involved in genetic studies of how, when and where the virus has spread, said in a series of tweets that he thought the study could be identifying people who had antibodies to other human coronaviruses, which cause common colds, although he did not rule out that it may have picked up some cases of travelers infected in other countries."
So the proof is not definitive at all. And there are other reports of finding the virus in samples taken from sewers in Italy as early as last September- how can that be explained? How could the virus have been present that far back, and yet the death spikes didn't happen until 6 months later?
All of these scattered reports may indicate an earlier presence of the virus, but there are question marks about all of them.
