I'm in quite the same boat. Heavily affected area. My whole family was sick in the period around the first notified case in the country. All the typical symptoms, but no-one severe. My wife still hardly smells.
... and still. I think it's a social psychology phenomenon. If I talk to our baker, her family has the same story. Friends as well. We all might like to believe we've had it and so we lightly skew the facts to fit our perception and hope. What I know as a fact (data released today) is that mortality was not rising in my region until two weeks after 'patient zero'. In our case three weeks after the first ill kid.
Occam's razor: It would be very hard to imagine wide-spread asymptomatic cases without symptomatic cases and deaths. No deaths means no spread. So we had something else.
I've heard this a lot, but there is another possible explanation - just speculating - that covid did appear and we're in the middle of a 2nd and more dangerous wave. IIRC 1918 flu behaved a bit like this, 2nd wave was more deadly. I'd really like to know if that's plausible, if any disease experts could speculate.
But what’s the theory then? If there was a widespread milder version of covid going around in places long before the deadly one took hold, then the newer deadlier strain would still have to be transmitted into each region separately. I don’t think it’s feasible that the mild strain spread globally and then flipped a switch and turned much deadlier all around the globe.
When would the first wave have happened? If it were in the last year we'd see immune response to the virus in the antibody tests now rolling out. And if happened before the current wave we'd expect to see a substantial degree of herd immunity and not be having the current epidemic spread so fast.
...I just saw a comment somewhere on here, possibly in another post, of someone wondering why took so long to spread given asymptomatic + pre-symptom spreading.
It means that most of those genetic variants don't change which proteins are coded for (the genetic code is redundant) and the remaining ones don't make any difference to disease progression. Well, there was one mutation in Singapore where one of the non-structural proteins got knocked out creating a strain that was less virulent but better able to hide from the immune system. Zoonaotic diseases usually become less virulent over time in general and a strain like that might become dominant after a number of years. But don't expect any noticeable changes in during the current outbreak except maybe in a few small pockets.
The ambiguity I was addressing was grammatical, not biological.
"now significant" could be a typo for "known significant", "non-significant", "no significant", "not significant", and possibly others, including not being a typo at all.
Likewise "significant" itself could mean different things in this context. E.g. phenotype neutral mutations can be highly informative when tracing origins, mutations in "non-coding" regions can have huge regulatory effects, etc.
I agree that your interpretation of the post to which I responded is plausible, but it's not the only one.
Good question, I don't know. Maybe the much milder strain went by so quistly there was no testing for a novel disease so we never knew. I don't know if that's plausible though.
It is not hard to imagine. If the number of serious cases is very low compared to total cases it will take a massive number of infected till serious cases start to stand out.
... and still. I think it's a social psychology phenomenon. If I talk to our baker, her family has the same story. Friends as well. We all might like to believe we've had it and so we lightly skew the facts to fit our perception and hope. What I know as a fact (data released today) is that mortality was not rising in my region until two weeks after 'patient zero'. In our case three weeks after the first ill kid.
Occam's razor: It would be very hard to imagine wide-spread asymptomatic cases without symptomatic cases and deaths. No deaths means no spread. So we had something else.