Maybe I’ve already had coronavirus

Now that we can be pretty sure the coronavirus was loose in the U.S. much earlier than anyone previously knew, quite a few Americans are recalling that nasty bug that walloped them over the winter and asking, could that have been coronavirus (Covid-19)?

And it’s not just civilians. Doctors are thinking back to unexplained respiratory cases among their patients. Medical examiners are looking for more misattributed deaths like the ones in California that rewrote the U.S. virus timeline this week. And local politicians are demanding investigations.

Researchers now say that hidden outbreaks were seeping through cities like Chicago, New York, Seattle and Boston in January and February, as unaware residents were going about their lives with no restrictions on their movements.

Public health experts now believe that for every known coronavirus case in the U.S., there are 5 to 20 more unknown ones — people who either had no symptoms or chalked them up to some other illness, and were never tested.

Could you be one of them — and now possibly immune to the virus? It’s complicated, experts say.

If you got over it a while ago, the virus probably won’t show up in a diagnostic test now. The way to spot past exposure is with an antibody test — but the tests presently being used to survey large populations do not yield reliable results for individuals.

More accurate antibody tests are on the way, but even if yours comes back positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re protected. Scientists don’t yet know how much immunity the antibodies offer, or how long it lasts.

“Everyone desperately wants to be immune to this thing,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, “and they’re projecting the hope onto the data.”

More likely: Keep in mind that for all the focus on the coronavirus, it was also a bad winter for seasonal influenza. So if you felt lousy in January or February, that’s probably what it was, not Covid-19.

High rates: Antibody screening tests are finding surprisingly high rates of coronavirus exposure in some states, including New York. Out of about 3,000 grocery shoppers who were checked, 14 percent statewide — and 21 percent in New York City — were positive.

Experts warned against reading too much into preliminary results, noting that the sample was far from representative. Even so, the results raised hope that many people who never became ill may now have some immunity.

By NYTimes