I'm still suspicious there's something going on that we don't understand with those tests. Someone I know was seriously ill for several weeks starting in late March with 9 out of the 11 listed symptoms for COVID-19. She eventually recovered and then tested negative on the Abbott SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibody assay. We can't definitively rule out some other virus but based on the timing and symptoms what else could it have been? It certainly didn't present like influenza.
I think the public is simply unaware of how bad the "regular" flu can be... it's a long tail but every year otherwise apparently young healthy people die of the flu. Not to mention confounding factors of latent conditions and concurrent diseases.
The implication of conspiracy theories is that the Chinese government:
* Perfectly covered up the initial outbreak
* Took no further action
* Utterly failed to cover the "second leak" that led to the pandemic
Seems unlikely?
An alternative theory is social media now disproportionately focuses on the regular bell-curve extremes of our normal flu season.
My wife and I visited Iceland last July. 5 days of the trip were spent trekking in the backcountry with a group from 4 different continents. When we got home, my wife came down with a terrible case of the flu that led to pneumonia. She never needed to be hospitalized but it was close for a couple days.
Eventually, it spread to my son and myself. It's the sickest I've ever been in my 40+ years of life. We didn't return to anything resembling normal until early October. It can't have been COVID but there must have been at least one really nasty flu bug going around last year.
Occam's razor says she had the flu and not Covid-19.
Influenza isn't one thing and the flu can have severe symptoms. Swine flu is also still going around. My wife's coworker (large tech company in the Bay Area) was positive for swine flu around March.
> Occam's razor says she had the flu and not Covid-19.
And, in most places, test positivity rates.
For months in my area covid-19 tests were only available for people with symptoms matching covid-19 - and those people were still testing 95%+ negative for covid-19.
Perhaps, but I've had the flu several times myself and seen many cases in others. This sure didn't look like a flu. I should add that in this particular case the patient's doctor diagnosed her with Covid-19 on a video call based on symptoms. And the patient had a current flu immunization (I know the flu shot isn't completely effective but even when it doesn't exactly match the viral strain it usually mitigates the symptoms).
I also had weird flus this year and last fall. Still tested negative. There are hundreds of viruses and many mutations that give similar symptoms. It's not unusual that you get unusual one for you this one time
It's always possible it was something else, but lack of (testable) antibodies does not rule out COVID-19 infection, as they are not always developed and/or expressed after some time. Seems like that may even be common.
Since T-cell immunity is rather hard to test, you may never know.
I was also pretty sick in early March but not sick enough to get a test then (they were in short supply of course). I recently got the Abbott blood-based anti-body test and I was quite surprised that I hadn't had covid-19 either.
