Some people have been speculating that COVID-19 was around last year. They or someone they know had a bad cold last fall, and they wonder if it was the coronavirus. I've doubted this from the beginning. First, people get bad colds and the flu every year. Assuming your bad cold last year was the coronavirus is like doubting your new mailman is really new because you've gotten mail before. Second, state governments and the CDC are buggo on keeping track of the flu. They issue detailed weekly flu reports and the CDC performs genetic testing on samples. It seems unlikely they'd have missed a novel virus. Third, surely someone in the federal government checked to see whether this virus had already been circulating for months before shutting down the economy. A couple of studies should put lingering doubts to rest. Trevor Bedford , a professor in the departments of genome sciences and epidemiology at the University of Washington, says , "We tested 3600 samples [from the
Do-it-yourself health. Low-carb, mostly evolutionary.