That Time You Got Sick This Winter Was Probably Not the Coronavirus

It’s becoming a ubiquitous social media post, the one in which the writer surmises they had Covid-19 before the world even knew about it. “Do you remember how sick everyone was during the holidays?” a Twitter user in Albuquerque, New Mexico posted on March 14.

She wondered if an illness she’d had in December had actually been coronavirus, even though the United States’ first confirmed case — from a man who had just returned to Washington state from Wuhan, China — was recorded on January 15.

The tweet got 43,000 retweets. And hundreds replied that they privately had the same idea. “I 100% had coronavirus over Christmas.” “Yes, my thoughts exactly! My entire household came down with it… We had to purchase a bigger humidifier.”

If you don’t know someone who’s been diagnosed with Covid-19, odds are you do know somebody who thinks they may have already had it before cases exploded around the world. It’s a favorite theory among Trump fans like Jack Posobiec, but among many, many others, too. On Sunday, the rapper Styles P told his 500,000 Twitter followers that “In January, I was down for a week and lost about eight pounds,” and that “it had to be” coronavirus.

Amid the confusion of the coronavirus pandemic, we’re desperate to be our own epidemiologists. But retrospective speculation is dangerous.

In recent weeks, the acute testing shortage in the United States has meant that many people with symptoms can’t get tested and are, cruelly, left wondering. But these aren’t the speculations I’m talking about. I’m talking about posts like the one from a friend of a friend, normally a stoic woman. She recalled on Facebook getting what had felt like the flu in October. But “I never had nasal stuff,” she observed. Now she suspects it was coronavirus.

In other Twitter threads, users have said, “I got it the Tuesday before Thanksgiving” or “I’m about 100% sure the coronavirus went through my household… my children had [a] fever for about 24–48 hours.” Some even trace their coronavirus infections back to last summer: “I’m 100% sure in August 2019… I had coronavirus.”

It’s fascinating and so zeitgeisty how many people try to put numbers on the certainty of their hunch. “I’m 96% sure I had the coronavirus back in November.” “I’m damn near 80% sure everybody in my office had coronavirus at the end of last year.” “I’m about 78% sure I had coronavirus in December/January.” (I couldn’t find one person on Twitter who confessed to feeling less than 50% sure that they already had the coronavirus.)

Amid the confusion of the coronavirus pandemic, we’re desperate to be our own epidemiologists. But retrospective speculation is dangerous. Unless we’re sick right now and arguing for greater testing availability, we must stop hypothesizing that we might have had the coronavirus. Sometimes the theories are intended to be reassuring (“Pretty sure I had coronavirus,” a PhD wrote on Twitter, but “I feel great now!”), but they recklessly muddy the waters as to what the virus’s symptoms really are. “Is it possible that some of us who contracted mysterious illnesses in [December] had coronavirus?” a writer I follow on Twitter recently asked her 25,000 followers. “My ear was bleeding at one point.” In the thread, someone wondered, therefore, if ear infections were a sign of Covid-19.

These projections also give a false sense of the disease’s manageability. “I believe I had the coronavirus in January,” one man announced, but with “natural remedies” like turmeric, he revealed, it had passed quickly. On the writer’s Twitter feed, many followers concurred that they’d probably already had Covid-19. It was a “fever for five days,” one reported.

But when the writer posted a poll asking “How worried are you about the coronavirus?” only a third of her respondents replied “Pretty worried.” More people answered “Not that worried” or the snarky “I welcome death.”

It’s easy to believe the whole world could handle that fever you had back in December. And it’s cool to be an early adopter; to understand and feel in your bones, literally, what other people haven’t figured out yet. Statistically, however, your 2019 illness had virtually a 0% chance of having been the novel coronavirus. Even if the darkest conspiracy theories about the government missing or covering up its spread were true, there is still a much more likely explanation: By early January, the United States had had more than 6 million cases of the flu in its 2019–2020 winter season, on track with the previous winter.

The chance that any given illness in Albuquerque in December was Covid-19 is negligible. “It’s not impossible that there were a few cases in the U.S. then because even highly contagious transmission chains can die out,” an epidemiologist told me. “But looking at the epidemic curves, that seems very unlikely. And even in that case, the probability that any particular person had it on Christmas is approximately zero.”

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