Just How Old Is COVID-19 Really?

Along with Zsa Zsa Gabor and the universe itself, there are several things whose real age have long been a mystery.   We can now add COVID-19 to this list as well.  The now-pandemic viral disease was first thought to have originated in December 2019 in a "wet market" (live animal market) in Wuhan, China.  Then, it was found that there were older cases not linked to that infamous "wet market" cluster, implying a different origin from that, and November 17 was then given as the date for the first known case.

But now there is increasing (albeit circumstantial) evidence that it may be even older still.  Satellite data from China, particularly Wuhan, suggest that hospitals saw unusually high traffic and unusually full parking lots in the fall of 2019, as far back as mid-September.  Internet search trends in Wuhan also show a spike for searches for "cough" and "diarrhea", two now-known key symptoms of COVID-19, the latter of which is generally not found in seasonal flu.  And those upward trends actually began in late summer.

Thus, it was very likely that travelers had brought it to the USA and Europe far earlier than originally believed.  Take this YouTube video from 10 months ago (August)--it discusses outbreaks of a mysterious respiratory illness in nursing homes in Fairfax County, Virginia.  While some antibody survey testing results were a bit underwhelming in several countries, we should keep in mind that, as Oxford Professor Sunetra Gupta notes, other facets of the immune system (such as T-cells) may have fought off the infection before the body had a chance to make antibodies to the virus, and indeed mild infections may not generate detectable levels of antibodies right away if at all.  There seems to be at least partial cross-immunity with exposure to related coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses).  So the percentage of positive antibody test results should really be seen as a lower bound for the percentage of the population that was already infected at some point. 

Thus, herd immunity is closer than you think, if we are not already there yet.  And it is that, and not the (belated) lockdowns, that is what really caused COVID-19 peak and then decline in so many places.

JULY UPDATE:  The plot thickens even more, it seems.  An analysis of old, frozen sewage samples from Spain finds that the virus was already circulating since at least as far back as January 15, 2020.  For the virus to be detectable in sewage, it must have been quite prevalent indeed!  That dovetails nicely with the positive test result of the reanalyzed old blood sample from a patient in France back in December 2019.  Moreover, the Spanish researchers subsequent analyzed old sewage samples from January 2018 through December 2019, finding all were negative except for March 12, 2019 (i.e. more than a year ago!), which was found to be weakly positive for the virus.  This means that either the test is more prone to false positives than we thought, or the virus is in fact a LOT older than anyone imagined, more than a full year old.  And just like its cousin SARS, it does not seem to be aging very well either in terms of its genetic material, and may very well be losing its "mojo".

AUGUST UPDATE:  There seems to be a growing scientific consensus lately that the COVID-19 virus likely originated in a lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology) rather than in nature.  Basically, researchers would do reckless "gain of function" experiments (which is illegal on most countries) on various bat coronavirusues to make them more contagious, more deadly, and/or more likely to jump species barriers, in order to study such phenomena. And perhaps one of these novel genetically modified (GMO) viruses "accidentally" escaped the lab and got into the population, and the rest is history.  If so, the institute and the government of China (and also the Trump regime who lifted Obama's moratorium on such research) really have a LOT of blood on their hands!  And the very best way to avenge the deaths of COVID-19 victims is to permanently ban such reckless experiments worldwide, no exceptions.

The latest theory is that that the virus actually originated in 2012 (leading some to call it COVID-12 instead) when a group of six miners in southwest China contracted pneumonia from it, which they likely got from exposure to bat guano in the mine shaft.  The Wuhan Institute of Virology then kept samples of this virus, which they perhaps tweaked even further using their so-called "gain of function" research.  The virus then escaped from the lab sometime in 2019, and as they say, the rest is history.

Another possible route is a genetically modified bat coronavirus from 2015, one deliberately engineered to make use of the human ACE2 receptor to enter our cells, which we now know that SARS-CoV-2 (aka COVID-19) does as well.  This "gain-of-function" research was apparently done in a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Again, all it would taken was for it to "accidentally" escape from the lab in order to easily cause a pandemic.

And now the plot thickens even further as a Chinese virologist turned whistleblower finally gets the chance to tell her story....

JANUARY 2021 UPDATE:  A genetic investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in China apparently puts it at October 2019 (if not earlier), which means the virus had been spreading months before Chinese authorities belatedly alerted the world.  Also, a new Bayesian analysis finds that, statistically speaking, the probability that the virus originated in a lab is practically certain.

Maybe even earlier than that, who knows? 

And while it turns out that only some pockets of herd immunity prevailed after the first wave in Europe and the USA, hence the second wave in several countries and states, the fact that the virus is now in retreat despite it being the middle of winter strongly suggests that we are at or very close to full herd immunity nearly everywhere now.  This is evident even before the vaccine would have had any effect, by the way.  The first wave, even in Sweden, apparently produced just enough immunity for seasonality to naturally suppress the virus temporarily in the summer, only to be followed by a fall/winter wave.  But Sweden's second wave was still not as bad as either their own first wave or the second waves of most other European countries.  And future major surges are unlikely in nearly every county going forward, even with new strains of the virus emerging.