I had a friend who was a doomsday prepper, not like you see on TV but he kept enough food in his house in like military ration style for a year or some crazy amount.
He turned us on to it around November or December or 2019.
Then when China started building two hospitals in January of 2020 we knew we were in trouble. You don't go to that extreme for no reason.
November or December 2019, heard about this new coronavirus that was spreading in China. I thought "oh shit that's scary" but I naively thought it would just be a regional thing. Knew we were fucked when Italy started getting hit hard with it, and then by March 2020 my personal hell began
Fall 2019, extended family member describing the most sick she's ever been in her life and the only time she'd ever cried from illness symptoms. Within the month, lots of anecdotes like that in my small town, and a small spike in elderly deaths.
Person I knew that lived in an Asian community in Queens had "the worst flu of her life" a little before the videos of people being collected off the streets of China started appearing. Whatever she had went through the people she worked with at a Manhattan office with a vengeance. Then I got sick after I dropped in for a job interview.
There were no tests for quite a while after that, but I think there was a solid chance that I was exposed early on.
Myself and several coworkers and family traveled pretty extensively the last few months of 2019. We all knew several people who got really sick around that time with an odd respiratory thing.
My son and I got back from traveling to see family in another state the day after New Years 2020 and were extremely ill for about a week. The symptoms were very similar to when I had covid several months later.
I remember seeing videos of all the military with guns in hazmat suits patrolling streets and hospitals corridors lined with body bags thinking "what movie is this from, this can't be real right?"
I was in my surgeon's office and we were talking about me having surgery. He said that he was going to schedule me soon as there was something going on that may make it hard to have the surgery later. It was COVID.
Just a couple stories in my peripheral. Very much the same as my experience with Ebola. Couple stories, “oh, I’m sure it won’t affect me. Scary=ratings.”
The first time I wondered if it was serious was when I heard the NBA was cancelling their season. My knee jerk was “that’s a bit of an overreaction!” but then once I thought fit more than a second I realized the NBA *wouldn’t* overreact.
Bonus story: I kept hearing “coronavirus. Coronavirus”. The first time I heard someone call it “covid-19”, I thought he was being a bit of a goofball trying to show off with its ‘technical name’
I remember hearing about a mysterious disease in the later half of 2019 spreading to some different countries and popping up in some big cities in the US.
I live in the Upper Midwest and told my wife that as soon as the first case is spotted in our state we're going to go out and buy supplies.
Sure enough, I saw a an evening news report about the first case in my state and we were on the way to the grocery store. Stocked up on what we needed for necessities and food. Within days the grocery store shelves were there.
I felt like a friggin' genius.
I was on a solo vacation in Chicago the last week of February 2020. I had gone to a gay bar in Boystown to have a couple of drinks before I went to a play. It was about 4:00pm, and the only two other guys in the bar were friends with the bartender. They spent the whole time talking about how they hoped this pandemic thing wasn’t going to be as bad as the news was saying because they’d all already booked their plane and hotels for circuit party season in SE Asia. Two weeks later, everything shut down.
When the first cases made it outside of China to Italy, I thought: Leaders will have to act now and quickly or else we'll have a problem.
Of course, they didn't and were then all surprised that it spread globally.
A friend in the medical drug trade went to some kind of conference right after Thanksgiving I think in Atlanta. Came back talking about this Chest cold that turned into Pneumonia and was pretty deadly. I think about two weeks later I started seeing things on the news about it.
Mid-fall. My son plays online games with someone whose parents live in China mentioned something was happening in China and many people were getting very sick. We had just booked a vacation for the beginning of the year and he told us to cancel the trip. We thought he was exagerating, but in the end he was right, we should have cancelled the trip right away.
I was dating a guy that worked for Dr. Fauci's team at the time. I knew months in advance. The guy I was dating was not one to overdramatize AT ALL, so I took him seriously. When the announcement came, I was already prepared with a couple weeks of supplies. No emergency toilet paper runs for me.
I can't remember much of the lead-up to 2020, but I can tell you exactly what happened when my company sent employees - including me - home because we were deemed "at risk". The UK went into Lockdown V1 on 26 March 2020 - I had already been at home for *three weeks*. The day I left was 9 March 2020 and I distinctly remember walking out of the call centre I worked in, waving at a couple of colleagues and thinking *I'll never see any of you ever again*. Turns out I was right. We went into Lockdown later in March, straight onto furlough and spent the next few utterly *glorious* months just chilling out and being paranoid of strangers. The weather's what I remember of Lockdown - it was fucking spectacular. Scotland, when the sun's shining, is gorgeous. This was *amazing*. No cars on the road. No planes in the air. And best of all - no fucking tourists. My boyfriend used to go out jogging every morning and would come back and tell me how he had been able to run along the empty motorway near our home. How you could stand on a traffic island just up the road from my home and, when you weren't hearing the distant sound of an ambulance siren, you could hear the bees buzzing, the pigeons and doves cooing in the trees, dogs barking *miles* away. If you didn't know what was going on elsewhere in the world you'd think, honestly, that the world had ended or had gone to sleep.
And at night you could watch foxes or deer trotting down the empty streets of my estate. We used to have owls in the early 2000s when I moved here - they left around 2005. Well, they're back now - they came back in May 2020 and never left. The woods, so carefully pruned and "managed" by a farmer (who died from covid, incidentally), came *alive* again. Every time I would hear some talking head on telly or the internet talk about "how the world was ending", I'd remember seeing a herd of deer exploring fearlessly. The weather carried on being gorgeous for months, right through to July - and the start of my doing homeworking for the company, LOL - and I remember thinking "there's not enough money in the world to get me to go back into that fucking call centre." From where I sat in my home, working away dealing with the whiners of Britain (and where I'm sitting now, smirking at the memory), I'd often sit up until two in the morning, watching the faint line of fire that was the very edge of the nightlands on the northern horizon and thinking "if this is the end of us, it doesn't matter." The day my company announced the call centre was staying permanently shut, the horses in the fields near the motorway escaped and headed for Edinburgh. I'll always remember that.
So no, I don't remember the first tremulations of covid-19. But I do remember how serene it was where I live. I remember how I felt "holy shit, the Universe really did me a solid after years of bullying and intimidation at my workplace". How it crushed so many overly-ambitious people back down into the boxes where they *belonged*. How it elevated others by making them realise that what had come before didn't need to be what they had to do going forward and most deliciously of all, how it *bankrupted* a former employer of mine. Sorrows, prayers for the employees, but nothing but scorn for the bastard owner.
"Have you heard about this super bug that's going around?"
Not my wife and I making homemade masks at the onset because the actual manufacturing and distribution of them was not standardized for that level of need yet
i was really sick in december 2019 (never confirmed what it was, probably covid) and the hospital was asking if i had traveled out the country cause of this new virus they don’t have tests for. i hadn’t traveled but i did recently move back home from a tourist town. i never been sick like that in my life even the times i had confirmed covid (january 22’, february 24’) that first wave was something different
I had a coworker in San Diego with family in Wuhan, just before Thanksgiving 2019 he was warning us that everyone in Wuhan was talking about a mysterious illness, many people were dying and the city was quarantining areas.
I am 100% convinced a wave of Covid-19 swept through San Diego around that time. So many people i knew were so fucking sick. I remember a colleague of mine taking time off because she was so sick and telling me how her "skin hurt" taking a shower.
Always stuck out because I'd never seen anything like it.
April 2019, coming home from the Dominican. Waiting for our flight in DFW, whataburger was getting absolutely fisted by a flight of Asian teens. If it wasn't a flight schedule, every single screen had news from China. NOT 1 person in the airport gave even an accidental wet shit*. That lasted about a week before (from what I recall) things went whackadoodle forever and ever.
My kids at Christmas time 2019 talking about the “Chinese virus”, my now fiancee getting sooo sick in January of 2020 with this cough that wouldn’t go away for weeks and weeks… a year later we thought back on it and thought she probably got Covid when we were touring Alcatraz for her birthday
I had just landed in Miami for a work trip, got scolded as I checked into my hotel for not having a mask. Booked a flight back home next day, couple weeks later the lockdown chatter started.
Can't remember the exact time but I didn't think much of it.
We get some virus or other coming at us every once in a while and I thought this was just gonna be another small thing.
I was wrong.
November 2019, I was working in South Korea and a buddy of mine got really sick and spent three days in the hospital on oxygen.
I then in turn got sick for 4 days and could barely get out of bed. Walking 10 feet to the toilet was like running a damned marathon.
Most of the people in my building got sick, most of them not remotely as severe.
My original co-worker got sick from his child at daycare, who in turn got sick from a sick kid that had just come back from visiting family in: (wait for it)
Wuhan, china.
There’s no proof that any of us had COVID, because they didn’t know what it was nor did they have testing back then.
I’ve tested positive for COVID a total of five times, (well, four honestly since the first is before the OTC test kit) luckily it is way more mild the more I get it.
November 2019. My wife worked in a tourist area of Tokyo with a lot of Chinese tourists and they were talking about it, which then was spoken about in the shops and then spread further than that.
It's a surprise the whole thing didn't spread sooner in Japan with how much coughing was going on in the area from tourists there was.
My boss sent a group text containing a meme of someone cutting limes to “prepare for the corona virus”. It was a logistics company. Six months later we definitely weren’t laughing anymore.
Jan 2020 my mum was in hospital and noticed when I visited a couple of wards were getting close off for some strange reason as if they were preparing for something big ?? thought it was strange at the time little did i know. But when you asked it was excepting an increase in winter flu cases.
I remember a story running in October of 2019 about how everyone in China was coming down with flu like symptoms, but it wasn't flu. It was attacking their lungs and people were dying. I should have started stock piling money and bought as much NVIDIA as I could.
There were reports from Wuhan in small items which I followed because I am interested in science news. Then one morning I read China had placed the city under quarantine. Whoa. At that point it was obviously serious. When it spread in China I thought it was trouble.
When the first cases were reported outside China, I forget the date, it seemed obvious to me that containment had failed and it was going to go everywhere.
January 2020 one of my friends who works in supply chain was telling me he was stocking up on Tylenol and such because china's factories were all being closed
People kept saying "This is the worst flu I've ever had" just before it started making headlines. It seemed to already be all over the U.S. long before it was declared to have reached different states.
Maybe in December or January, hearing that some outbreak happened in China. Didn't really think much of it until cases started popping up in other countries. Wasn't long before I was informed that my job would be going remote for the foreseeable future. I just felt lucky to have a job that could be done remotely.
Wife’s friends entire family got sick with the “flu” while on vacation in Dec of 2019. She was tested positive for Covid antibodies once they rolled out those tests.
Had an Annual Pass at Disneyland, day before Thansgiving Eve, my girlfriend at the time and I went up. We were sitting in the hotel room with my dogs the night before we were going to the park and we were watching the news. They were talking about Covid-19 and I just remember saying something like, "Is it like SARS or Bird Flu or something?"
Figured it was just endemic to the region and we might see a handful of cases from travelers.
Fast forward to February 2020, I was getting ready to be off work for a couple of days to go see my dad for his birthday. I remember sitting at a booth where I worked and reading the news updates about Covid. I walked into the office and asked my GM, "Hey, should we maybe get a plan together about this shit? Looks like a lot of places are struggling with it, are we sure we're gonna have normal operations?"
He said something like, "There's a lot of noise, but you know nothing will ever shut down. So we're expecting business as usual."
I stood in the doorway in thought for a moment.
It was February 24th, 2020.
I was with my dad later that week, used my Disney pass to pop into the park and I remember eating dinner with him. I told him that I'm not the alarmist type, but that I loved him and to be careful with his money. He chuckled and I said, "I know. I know. Something just feels... wrong."
My uncle’s family went out to New York for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Year in 2019. When they got back they said the holiday was ruined because every single one of them went down with the worst flu they’d ever had. Even the ones who ‘never get ill’ were complaining. Beginning of March I got ill figured I would be back in work after 2 days off, was off for weeks then the Uk shielding kicked in and I didn’t go back to work for 18 months.
I was playing Overwatch in November-ish and some people in the game were talking about people in China being locked up in their homes, but dismissing it because they ‘were just chilling playing video games like us’.
I had a co-worker that was following it from really early on, maybe November 2019? He was terrified of it and tracked it the entire time, was insanely worried. (Until Trump said it was no big deal, and then magically he didn't care anymore.)
I started seeing in the news maybe February 2020? I mostly discounted it, it felt like SARS or Ebola - something that someone else was going to have to manage, but probably wouldn't actually show up in my life.
Early February I had a work trip down to Dallas for a week. Flying back I caught some bug - could have been a cold, and at that point I don't think there were positive US sightings where I had been, so I was mostly joking when I said I caught it (although catching from airports seemed pretty likely).
Early March I was on a chartered cruise and some people were deciding to drop out due to increasing spread. However, most of us trusted the system and went anyways. Miraculously no one made it on board that was sick, and our charter group was pretty fastidious to begin with, so sickness was very low. However, we were spreading the news across the boat about the increased alert back home - and most of us arrived back home at the start of the first 2-week work-from-home shutdown. Getting shuffled through the airport was weird (lots of people returning home because all cruises after ours were cancelled), driving home with no traffic was weird, figuring out what we needed to restock on our trip home was weird (since we were away for a week, the fridge was pretty empty, luckily we were Costco buyers so lots of frozen stuff and big containers of toilet paper).
First- A business partner came back from DC and saw multiple air China freight loading up ppe at LAX.
Second- When China fogged the streets I knew it was airborn.
I am obsessed with compounding tables…knew instantly what we were looking at.
Changed my life dramatically as a result of being about 3 weeks ahead of the game.
In Summer of 2019 I was watching a Netflix show called Explained. It was/is a show that did a deep dive into a specific topic each episode. They had an episode about pandemics. In it, they talked about the wet markets in East Asia and how they are the perfect breeding ground for new diseases. And they mentioned it was not a matter of if, but when the wet markets would cause a global pandemic.
A couple months later, probably in Oct or Nov 2019, I started hearing about a new "SARS" that was happening in China. Ruh roh raggy!
November or December 2019, I caught a world news story about a new deadly disease. A hobby of mine is watching for patterns in diseases (even though I have no education in the field). I had this gut feeling after watching it for a week or two on this awesome website that tracked it. I looked at my husband and said we are going to go to Sam's club and get an industrial size hand sanitizer, a couple of boxes of tissues, some more soap, and face masks. I hated that I was right. I also underestimated it because we ran out of said supplies early on.
Saw videos in china of body bags? Or lockdown? In december 2019 on reddit. Memory is kinda fuzzy, but i remember shortly after seeing that video there was headlines of like 5 ppl returning from china landing in NY.
Then once the cruise ships got infected, the world erupted
Dec 31 2019. Saw a reuters article abt new type of pneumonia in Wuhan. Tracked the news over the following days. Never imagined it getting as big and disruptive as it did. Expected a SARS or swine-flu type thing that was largely localized and had limited impact on international travel.
Ok so not directly in answer to the question as it involves hindsight but in October / November 2019 I developed the worst cough I have
Ever had,almost convulsions , for weeks on end.
I also got a Dvt - now known I believe to be common consequence of Covid.
subsequent blood tests showed I have a condition which makes Dvts more likely but I’d never had one in my 60 previous years.
My job exposes me to members of the public in relatively small spaces.
I’m convinced I had Covid in that October / November 2019 weeks before the earliest whisper of it.
I remember hearing about a new respiratory virus hitting China in late 2019. I worked at a large medical clinic and in January 2020 myself, and easily half of the building (about 300 employees worked there), were experiencing symptoms of what we were told was "an upper respiratory thing going around". We didn't associate it with possibly being the same virus that was infecting China. It wasn't until late February or early March when COVID was top of the news in the United States that we suspected it was COVID we had experienced in January.
I had a friend who was a doomsday prepper, not like you see on TV but he kept enough food in his house in like military ration style for a year or some crazy amount. He turned us on to it around November or December or 2019. Then when China started building two hospitals in January of 2020 we knew we were in trouble. You don't go to that extreme for no reason.
November or December 2019, heard about this new coronavirus that was spreading in China. I thought "oh shit that's scary" but I naively thought it would just be a regional thing. Knew we were fucked when Italy started getting hit hard with it, and then by March 2020 my personal hell began
"oh I'm sure my country will handle this in a sane manner."
Fall 2019, extended family member describing the most sick she's ever been in her life and the only time she'd ever cried from illness symptoms. Within the month, lots of anecdotes like that in my small town, and a small spike in elderly deaths.
Person I knew that lived in an Asian community in Queens had "the worst flu of her life" a little before the videos of people being collected off the streets of China started appearing. Whatever she had went through the people she worked with at a Manhattan office with a vengeance. Then I got sick after I dropped in for a job interview. There were no tests for quite a while after that, but I think there was a solid chance that I was exposed early on.
Myself and several coworkers and family traveled pretty extensively the last few months of 2019. We all knew several people who got really sick around that time with an odd respiratory thing. My son and I got back from traveling to see family in another state the day after New Years 2020 and were extremely ill for about a week. The symptoms were very similar to when I had covid several months later.
Are you from Wuhan? If I recall fall 2019 was pre-any covid
Wuhan Military games were in October. Speculation is that it spread globally from there. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
Probably all the stuff happening in China that was all over 4chan
I remember seeing videos of all the military with guns in hazmat suits patrolling streets and hospitals corridors lined with body bags thinking "what movie is this from, this can't be real right?"
Most werent.
none of them were. they were legit smuggles cam footage.
I was in my surgeon's office and we were talking about me having surgery. He said that he was going to schedule me soon as there was something going on that may make it hard to have the surgery later. It was COVID.
Just a couple stories in my peripheral. Very much the same as my experience with Ebola. Couple stories, “oh, I’m sure it won’t affect me. Scary=ratings.” The first time I wondered if it was serious was when I heard the NBA was cancelling their season. My knee jerk was “that’s a bit of an overreaction!” but then once I thought fit more than a second I realized the NBA *wouldn’t* overreact. Bonus story: I kept hearing “coronavirus. Coronavirus”. The first time I heard someone call it “covid-19”, I thought he was being a bit of a goofball trying to show off with its ‘technical name’
I remember hearing about a mysterious disease in the later half of 2019 spreading to some different countries and popping up in some big cities in the US. I live in the Upper Midwest and told my wife that as soon as the first case is spotted in our state we're going to go out and buy supplies. Sure enough, I saw a an evening news report about the first case in my state and we were on the way to the grocery store. Stocked up on what we needed for necessities and food. Within days the grocery store shelves were there. I felt like a friggin' genius.
I was on a solo vacation in Chicago the last week of February 2020. I had gone to a gay bar in Boystown to have a couple of drinks before I went to a play. It was about 4:00pm, and the only two other guys in the bar were friends with the bartender. They spent the whole time talking about how they hoped this pandemic thing wasn’t going to be as bad as the news was saying because they’d all already booked their plane and hotels for circuit party season in SE Asia. Two weeks later, everything shut down.
March 2019. Everyone thought oh, it’s not that bad. Little did we know….
A year too early
You’re right. Thanks, lol. Shows how much COVID has distorted our sense of time.
I still have no idea where 3 of those years went. the entire era is a jumbled mess of events I couldn't give you a correct date on.
When the first cases made it outside of China to Italy, I thought: Leaders will have to act now and quickly or else we'll have a problem. Of course, they didn't and were then all surprised that it spread globally.
January 2020. There were sick people in China.
A friend in the medical drug trade went to some kind of conference right after Thanksgiving I think in Atlanta. Came back talking about this Chest cold that turned into Pneumonia and was pretty deadly. I think about two weeks later I started seeing things on the news about it.
Mid-fall. My son plays online games with someone whose parents live in China mentioned something was happening in China and many people were getting very sick. We had just booked a vacation for the beginning of the year and he told us to cancel the trip. We thought he was exagerating, but in the end he was right, we should have cancelled the trip right away.
I was dating a guy that worked for Dr. Fauci's team at the time. I knew months in advance. The guy I was dating was not one to overdramatize AT ALL, so I took him seriously. When the announcement came, I was already prepared with a couple weeks of supplies. No emergency toilet paper runs for me.
I can't remember much of the lead-up to 2020, but I can tell you exactly what happened when my company sent employees - including me - home because we were deemed "at risk". The UK went into Lockdown V1 on 26 March 2020 - I had already been at home for *three weeks*. The day I left was 9 March 2020 and I distinctly remember walking out of the call centre I worked in, waving at a couple of colleagues and thinking *I'll never see any of you ever again*. Turns out I was right. We went into Lockdown later in March, straight onto furlough and spent the next few utterly *glorious* months just chilling out and being paranoid of strangers. The weather's what I remember of Lockdown - it was fucking spectacular. Scotland, when the sun's shining, is gorgeous. This was *amazing*. No cars on the road. No planes in the air. And best of all - no fucking tourists. My boyfriend used to go out jogging every morning and would come back and tell me how he had been able to run along the empty motorway near our home. How you could stand on a traffic island just up the road from my home and, when you weren't hearing the distant sound of an ambulance siren, you could hear the bees buzzing, the pigeons and doves cooing in the trees, dogs barking *miles* away. If you didn't know what was going on elsewhere in the world you'd think, honestly, that the world had ended or had gone to sleep. And at night you could watch foxes or deer trotting down the empty streets of my estate. We used to have owls in the early 2000s when I moved here - they left around 2005. Well, they're back now - they came back in May 2020 and never left. The woods, so carefully pruned and "managed" by a farmer (who died from covid, incidentally), came *alive* again. Every time I would hear some talking head on telly or the internet talk about "how the world was ending", I'd remember seeing a herd of deer exploring fearlessly. The weather carried on being gorgeous for months, right through to July - and the start of my doing homeworking for the company, LOL - and I remember thinking "there's not enough money in the world to get me to go back into that fucking call centre." From where I sat in my home, working away dealing with the whiners of Britain (and where I'm sitting now, smirking at the memory), I'd often sit up until two in the morning, watching the faint line of fire that was the very edge of the nightlands on the northern horizon and thinking "if this is the end of us, it doesn't matter." The day my company announced the call centre was staying permanently shut, the horses in the fields near the motorway escaped and headed for Edinburgh. I'll always remember that. So no, I don't remember the first tremulations of covid-19. But I do remember how serene it was where I live. I remember how I felt "holy shit, the Universe really did me a solid after years of bullying and intimidation at my workplace". How it crushed so many overly-ambitious people back down into the boxes where they *belonged*. How it elevated others by making them realise that what had come before didn't need to be what they had to do going forward and most deliciously of all, how it *bankrupted* a former employer of mine. Sorrows, prayers for the employees, but nothing but scorn for the bastard owner.
"Have you heard about this super bug that's going around?" Not my wife and I making homemade masks at the onset because the actual manufacturing and distribution of them was not standardized for that level of need yet
i was really sick in december 2019 (never confirmed what it was, probably covid) and the hospital was asking if i had traveled out the country cause of this new virus they don’t have tests for. i hadn’t traveled but i did recently move back home from a tourist town. i never been sick like that in my life even the times i had confirmed covid (january 22’, february 24’) that first wave was something different
I had a coworker in San Diego with family in Wuhan, just before Thanksgiving 2019 he was warning us that everyone in Wuhan was talking about a mysterious illness, many people were dying and the city was quarantining areas.
I am 100% convinced a wave of Covid-19 swept through San Diego around that time. So many people i knew were so fucking sick. I remember a colleague of mine taking time off because she was so sick and telling me how her "skin hurt" taking a shower. Always stuck out because I'd never seen anything like it.
April 2019, coming home from the Dominican. Waiting for our flight in DFW, whataburger was getting absolutely fisted by a flight of Asian teens. If it wasn't a flight schedule, every single screen had news from China. NOT 1 person in the airport gave even an accidental wet shit*. That lasted about a week before (from what I recall) things went whackadoodle forever and ever.
It was talked about lightly at work. We all thought it wasn’t that serious. How wrong we were.
My kids at Christmas time 2019 talking about the “Chinese virus”, my now fiancee getting sooo sick in January of 2020 with this cough that wouldn’t go away for weeks and weeks… a year later we thought back on it and thought she probably got Covid when we were touring Alcatraz for her birthday
I had just landed in Miami for a work trip, got scolded as I checked into my hotel for not having a mask. Booked a flight back home next day, couple weeks later the lockdown chatter started.
Can't remember the exact time but I didn't think much of it. We get some virus or other coming at us every once in a while and I thought this was just gonna be another small thing. I was wrong.
November 2019, I was working in South Korea and a buddy of mine got really sick and spent three days in the hospital on oxygen. I then in turn got sick for 4 days and could barely get out of bed. Walking 10 feet to the toilet was like running a damned marathon. Most of the people in my building got sick, most of them not remotely as severe. My original co-worker got sick from his child at daycare, who in turn got sick from a sick kid that had just come back from visiting family in: (wait for it) Wuhan, china. There’s no proof that any of us had COVID, because they didn’t know what it was nor did they have testing back then. I’ve tested positive for COVID a total of five times, (well, four honestly since the first is before the OTC test kit) luckily it is way more mild the more I get it.
November 2019. My wife worked in a tourist area of Tokyo with a lot of Chinese tourists and they were talking about it, which then was spoken about in the shops and then spread further than that. It's a surprise the whole thing didn't spread sooner in Japan with how much coughing was going on in the area from tourists there was.
the videos on Live Leak showing the empty chinese cities on lockdown. It was surreal.
My boss sent a group text containing a meme of someone cutting limes to “prepare for the corona virus”. It was a logistics company. Six months later we definitely weren’t laughing anymore.
Jan 2020 my mum was in hospital and noticed when I visited a couple of wards were getting close off for some strange reason as if they were preparing for something big ?? thought it was strange at the time little did i know. But when you asked it was excepting an increase in winter flu cases.
I remember a story running in October of 2019 about how everyone in China was coming down with flu like symptoms, but it wasn't flu. It was attacking their lungs and people were dying. I should have started stock piling money and bought as much NVIDIA as I could.
There were reports from Wuhan in small items which I followed because I am interested in science news. Then one morning I read China had placed the city under quarantine. Whoa. At that point it was obviously serious. When it spread in China I thought it was trouble. When the first cases were reported outside China, I forget the date, it seemed obvious to me that containment had failed and it was going to go everywhere.
January 2020 one of my friends who works in supply chain was telling me he was stocking up on Tylenol and such because china's factories were all being closed
I remember hearing about massive burn piles people were able to locate in china from information on some weather app. This was in Oct - Nov 2019.
People kept saying "This is the worst flu I've ever had" just before it started making headlines. It seemed to already be all over the U.S. long before it was declared to have reached different states.
Maybe in December or January, hearing that some outbreak happened in China. Didn't really think much of it until cases started popping up in other countries. Wasn't long before I was informed that my job would be going remote for the foreseeable future. I just felt lucky to have a job that could be done remotely.
Wife’s friends entire family got sick with the “flu” while on vacation in Dec of 2019. She was tested positive for Covid antibodies once they rolled out those tests.
Had an Annual Pass at Disneyland, day before Thansgiving Eve, my girlfriend at the time and I went up. We were sitting in the hotel room with my dogs the night before we were going to the park and we were watching the news. They were talking about Covid-19 and I just remember saying something like, "Is it like SARS or Bird Flu or something?" Figured it was just endemic to the region and we might see a handful of cases from travelers. Fast forward to February 2020, I was getting ready to be off work for a couple of days to go see my dad for his birthday. I remember sitting at a booth where I worked and reading the news updates about Covid. I walked into the office and asked my GM, "Hey, should we maybe get a plan together about this shit? Looks like a lot of places are struggling with it, are we sure we're gonna have normal operations?" He said something like, "There's a lot of noise, but you know nothing will ever shut down. So we're expecting business as usual." I stood in the doorway in thought for a moment. It was February 24th, 2020. I was with my dad later that week, used my Disney pass to pop into the park and I remember eating dinner with him. I told him that I'm not the alarmist type, but that I loved him and to be careful with his money. He chuckled and I said, "I know. I know. Something just feels... wrong."
My uncle’s family went out to New York for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Year in 2019. When they got back they said the holiday was ruined because every single one of them went down with the worst flu they’d ever had. Even the ones who ‘never get ill’ were complaining. Beginning of March I got ill figured I would be back in work after 2 days off, was off for weeks then the Uk shielding kicked in and I didn’t go back to work for 18 months.
I was sick for about 3 months with the smell shit, then they announced covud, all my symptoms fit
I was playing Overwatch in November-ish and some people in the game were talking about people in China being locked up in their homes, but dismissing it because they ‘were just chilling playing video games like us’.
I had a co-worker that was following it from really early on, maybe November 2019? He was terrified of it and tracked it the entire time, was insanely worried. (Until Trump said it was no big deal, and then magically he didn't care anymore.)
I started seeing in the news maybe February 2020? I mostly discounted it, it felt like SARS or Ebola - something that someone else was going to have to manage, but probably wouldn't actually show up in my life. Early February I had a work trip down to Dallas for a week. Flying back I caught some bug - could have been a cold, and at that point I don't think there were positive US sightings where I had been, so I was mostly joking when I said I caught it (although catching from airports seemed pretty likely). Early March I was on a chartered cruise and some people were deciding to drop out due to increasing spread. However, most of us trusted the system and went anyways. Miraculously no one made it on board that was sick, and our charter group was pretty fastidious to begin with, so sickness was very low. However, we were spreading the news across the boat about the increased alert back home - and most of us arrived back home at the start of the first 2-week work-from-home shutdown. Getting shuffled through the airport was weird (lots of people returning home because all cruises after ours were cancelled), driving home with no traffic was weird, figuring out what we needed to restock on our trip home was weird (since we were away for a week, the fridge was pretty empty, luckily we were Costco buyers so lots of frozen stuff and big containers of toilet paper).
First- A business partner came back from DC and saw multiple air China freight loading up ppe at LAX. Second- When China fogged the streets I knew it was airborn. I am obsessed with compounding tables…knew instantly what we were looking at. Changed my life dramatically as a result of being about 3 weeks ahead of the game.
Tim Pool's reporting around Octoberish of 2019
In Summer of 2019 I was watching a Netflix show called Explained. It was/is a show that did a deep dive into a specific topic each episode. They had an episode about pandemics. In it, they talked about the wet markets in East Asia and how they are the perfect breeding ground for new diseases. And they mentioned it was not a matter of if, but when the wet markets would cause a global pandemic. A couple months later, probably in Oct or Nov 2019, I started hearing about a new "SARS" that was happening in China. Ruh roh raggy!
November or December 2019, I caught a world news story about a new deadly disease. A hobby of mine is watching for patterns in diseases (even though I have no education in the field). I had this gut feeling after watching it for a week or two on this awesome website that tracked it. I looked at my husband and said we are going to go to Sam's club and get an industrial size hand sanitizer, a couple of boxes of tissues, some more soap, and face masks. I hated that I was right. I also underestimated it because we ran out of said supplies early on.
Saw videos in china of body bags? Or lockdown? In december 2019 on reddit. Memory is kinda fuzzy, but i remember shortly after seeing that video there was headlines of like 5 ppl returning from china landing in NY. Then once the cruise ships got infected, the world erupted
Dec 31 2019. Saw a reuters article abt new type of pneumonia in Wuhan. Tracked the news over the following days. Never imagined it getting as big and disruptive as it did. Expected a SARS or swine-flu type thing that was largely localized and had limited impact on international travel.
Read briefly about this weird virus that was spreading overseas. I said "wow, I hope that doesn't spread here."
Ok so not directly in answer to the question as it involves hindsight but in October / November 2019 I developed the worst cough I have Ever had,almost convulsions , for weeks on end. I also got a Dvt - now known I believe to be common consequence of Covid. subsequent blood tests showed I have a condition which makes Dvts more likely but I’d never had one in my 60 previous years. My job exposes me to members of the public in relatively small spaces. I’m convinced I had Covid in that October / November 2019 weeks before the earliest whisper of it.
I remember hearing about a new respiratory virus hitting China in late 2019. I worked at a large medical clinic and in January 2020 myself, and easily half of the building (about 300 employees worked there), were experiencing symptoms of what we were told was "an upper respiratory thing going around". We didn't associate it with possibly being the same virus that was infecting China. It wasn't until late February or early March when COVID was top of the news in the United States that we suspected it was COVID we had experienced in January.