Positive Covid-19 antigen tests with Norwegian blood samples from 2019
aftenposten.noI'm not Norwegian(Swedish) and as far as I understand the article makes no mention of antigen tests. The article is talking about *antibodies* being found in blood tests from December 2019.
I think the title should be changed, if someone who speaks Norwegian can weigh in that'd be helpful.
This section is also interesting
Det er også tidligere i pandemien påvist at koronaviruset sirkulerte i Italia i 2019, så tidlig som i september 2019, viser en italiensk studie fra Milano.
Forskere har påpekt at viruset trolig også sirkulerte i kinesiske Wuhan lenge før det ble offisielt påvist. Hovedteorien er fortsatt at viruset først spredte seg der.
It has also been proven, earlier in the pandemic, that COVID19 was circulating in Italy in 2019, as early as September, according to an Italian study from Milano.
Scientist have pointed out that the virus likely circulated in Wuhan a long time before it was officially detected[påvist, unsure if this is "proven"]. The leading theory remains that the virus originated there.
You're correct that the article doesn't mention antigen tests, ~~but the actual study[0] does~~:
Edit: Apparantly the described test[1] is indeed for antibodies. See child comment by projektfu.
> Summary:
> We studied SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in Norway by including all women who were first trimester pregnant (n=6520), each month from December 2019 through December 2020, in the catchment region of Norway’s second largest hospital. We used sera that had been frozen stored after compulsory testing for syphilis antibodies in antenatal care. The sera were analyzed with the Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay (Roche Diagnostics, Cobas e801). This immunoassay detects IgG/IgM against SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
[1] https://diagnostics.roche.com/content/dam/diagnostics/Bluepr...
Thanks for digging up the primary source.
The part you cited describes an antibody test.
You're absolutely right. Updated the comment to reflect that.
dang: Please change the link to point to that study.
This is a reputable newspaper but I would be careful in taking statements like early circulation in country x or y at face value. There are literally thousands of studies looking back at such data. Even if all of them are done with 100% sound methodology some are by mere statistics bound to find a positive result. Just like you can also dig up studies finding no link between smoking and cancer we have to look at the whole picture that thousands of studies find no such prior circulation.
I can't edit anymore but please also see this comment chain below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083921
All this fuss about THREE positive samples from December 2019, which might be false positives.
I don't put any credence in this study but I will point out that the likely origin of HIV were probed and they managed to recover HIV samples in blood from 1959. these results are now generally accepted. Note, however, it looks like at least one case was an example of sample mixups or contamination, which is common when dealign with tiny amounts of virus and amplification techniques.
It was a rare disease. You can't expect a rare disease to be found often.
You are assuming that what they found is indeed a marker of covid-19. It might well be that they found antibodies for another coronavirus that for whatever reason shows on the tests used. There are many coronavira and not all very well researched. Nor is each test precise in each condition, e.g. in the paper they describe how specificity and sensitivity vary depending on the age of the sample, then calculate false positive/negative values using one of those values. Has the test been tested for pregnant women and frozen samples? Might there be other factors, e.g. cross-contamination with some equipment they use?
Its not unusual for even well-done studies to later be revealed as flawed, so its important not to take results of one single study as ultimate truth.
Actually, what I tried to say is that prior to becoming a common disease, it was a rare disease for a while, and precisely because it wasn't common, expecting it to be found often is unreasonable. Saying that a find is unlikely because most people found nothing is meaningless, because we already know that the virus wasn't common before it became common.
I looked up the test they used, and it's among the better ones.
"supercontagious" and "rare" disease is an oxymoron
That's right, in the sense that a supercontagious disease cannot stay rare for long. For how long can is stay rare? For how many months? That's a nontrivial question for a diseases such as this, which has both superspreaders and a large number of patients that infect noone.
nothing has been "proven" yet. the bar for proof is extremely high and requires multiple groups to replicate results with different samples. I believe the current mainstream science with large support is that COVID entered the US some time before late December and the earliest trusted samples are from China, november, with the virus entering the US before the Chinese detected it in Wuhan.
If this is correct, people having antibodies, then it would be even more interesting, imho.
This is not blood samples that are positive for antigen, but blood samples that contain covid-19 reactive antibodies.
Now, cross-reactive antibodies is a thing, so I wouldn't pay a lot of attention to these number unless they can show that e.g. blood from 2017 had much less covid-19-reactive antibodies than the blood from 2019.
Yeah, this is just crazy. They had blood samples going back five years, and did not run any earlier samples for calibration. But the paper claims the test has a specificity of 99.8% and the positive rate until March is 0.2% -- just the expected date of false positives.
This seems to be the only comment on this thread making sense.
Doesn't that requirement implicitly assume that SARS-CoV-2 prevalence grew linearly over time? What if 2017 had equal prevalence to 2019?
Of course not linear. The growth would be exponential. It is impossible for Covid to have existed in humans in 2017. You would need to explain how that exponential growth was invisible for years, and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019.
2017 and 2019 did indeed have the same prevalence in Europe: 0%.
It wouldn't be exponential. That's the discredited "viruses grow until exponentially until the entire population is infected" model that keeps embarrassing epidemiologists.
Epidemics come and go in waves. They always did. They don't grow until everyone has been sick, they exhibit far more complex patterns than that, hence why the term endemic is now coming up so often. It doesn't seem impossible that there were waves of COVID before 2020 and they just didn't get detected as such, given the large number of asymptomatic people, the vague symptoms that can be easily confused with other diseases, etc. I don't personally think it's likely, but continuous exponential growth is definitely not a safe assumption.
Re: phylogenetic analysis. Well, the phylogenetic tree they are building classifies something as COV2 if it can be linked into the phylogenetic tree that is rooted at the samples taken in Sept 2019, and was detected after that point. If it can't be, then it's not COV2 by definition. There's a risk of circularity there.
It is completely impossible for Covid to have been present in humans in 2017. It did not take a lot for Covid to be discovered originally: a cluster of dozens of undiagnosed pneumonia cases was enough to trigger a deeper investigation and rapidly pinpoint the new virus. Why did this never happen before? Either it would have to be the case that the progenitors did not cause these symptoms (and if it didn't, well, how was it Covid?) or that the authorities everywhere in the world were incompetent for two years until suddenly we got lucky and actually asked for the right investigations to be done?
And then you'd still need to explain how the actual spread of Covid, after it was discovered, was a gradual process rather than being found to be massively prevalent all over the world the moment it was discovered.
I don't really understand your point about phylogenetics being inaccurate here. Are you claiming that samples of Covid have been artificially dropped from the tree to make it build with such a recent common ancenstor? Or that we've got a huge proportion of Covid cases that were incorrectly never diagnosed as such because nobody was considering some earlier. The latter is total nonsense.
Your theory just doesn't fit any of the facts.
Well, to be clear I agree that it's very likely it originated in Wuhan in 2019. I believe the evidence for a lab leak, the EcoHealth stuff, Fauci's involvement etc is well beyond the balance of probabilities at this point. I just don't think an argument about phylogenetic trees can prove it, because of the way those trees are defined.
To play the devil's advocate:
- "a cluster of dozens of undiagnosed pneumonia cases was enough to trigger a deeper investigation and rapidly pinpoint the new virus"
A cluster of undiagnosed pneumonia cases ... that occurred right next to a large coronavirus research lab. Which presumably the hospital staff knew all about. If I worked at the local hospital of a vast virus lab then I'd be quick off the mark to test people showing weird symptoms for novel viruses too.
- "Either it would have to be the case that the progenitors did not cause these symptoms (and if it didn't, well, how was it Covid?)"
That's easy. COVID isn't defined by symptoms, is it? The definition of COVID being used by governments is "tested positive on a SARS-CoV-2 PCR test". The clinical symptoms of COVID include all possible symptoms of any respiratory illness including no symptoms at all, which is useless.
- "you'd still need to explain how the actual spread of Covid, after it was discovered, was a gradual process rather than being found to be massively prevalent all over the world the moment it was discovered"
It comes and goes in waves. If the start of testing was triggered not by the actual new emergence of the virus but by the proximity of some cases to a massive lab with hyper-vigilant doctors, then as test capacity ramped up we'd be able to observe the next seasonal wave and we'd think it was the first (incorrectly).
- "Are you claiming that samples of Covid have been artificially dropped from the tree to make it build with such a recent common ancenstor?"
COVID is literally defined as "the presence of a viral RNA sequence that can be fitted into this phylogenetic tree". Anything else isn't SARS-CoV-2 and thus not COVID, by definition. Consider that the tree has two roots! It has to have two roots because right at the very start COVID did have a clinical definition and the viruses they were finding didn't trace to a common ancestor. The re-definition of COVID as testing positive only came later with the introduction of mass testing.
> and why phylogenetic analysis shows the common ancestry in around September 2019.
September 16, 2019? It's easy: blast at BSL4 lab «Vector».
«On September 16th, 2019, an explosion occurred at the State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology building (Vector) in the city of Koltsovo, in the Novosiberisk region of Siberia, Russia (1). The affected building was a BSL 4 virology research centre, and one of only two known sites housing variola virus, the cause of smallpox. The facility has one of the largest collections of dangerous pathogens in the world. Whilst laboratory safety breaches are common and do not usually result in epidemics, explosions are rare. Unlike a needlestick injury or an accidental shipping of live anthrax, an explosion of this magnitude is likely to lead to a physical breach of the integrity of the laboratory, possibly affecting multiple parts of the structure and equipment within. An explosion is sudden, uncontrolled and unpredictable, and involves force which may result in pathogen release into the surrounding environment. An epidemic which arises in close proximity to the explosion could spread beyond the affected region or even globally, which makes this event a concern for global public health.»
If blood samples from 2017 have similar number of positives as blood samples from 2019, then we can be quite certain that the positive tests (or test) from December 2019 were false positives. (Which I think is already the vastly most likely explanation.)
Actual study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
Original press release: https://www.ahus.no/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan-ha-vert-i-norg...
Google translated version: https://www-ahus-no.translate.goog/nyheter/koronaviruset-kan...
Thanks. From the press release:
Rundt 500 prøver per måned er blitt testet for antistoffer mot SARS-CoV-2, og det ble funnet ett positivt utslag i desember 2019, to i januar 2020, og ett i både februar og mars.
Av de totalt 6520 kvinnene som ble undersøkt gjennom hele perioden, ble det påvist antistoffer hos 98 kvinner.
Det må tas høyde for at en viss andel falske positive utslag kan oppstå, men forskerne konkluderer med at funnene tyder på at viruset sirkulerte i Norge allerede i 2019.
So one sample from December 2019 and two from January 2020 tested positive, and they may be false positives.
There was another one in France a while back. I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all)
But given that we only seen 2 samples among millions, could this simply be an error? Like test errors, mislabelled or the sample being infected at a later point?
I don't know why you think this means it didn't originate in Wuhan. It just means it was outside China earlier than we've thought.
We already know the CCP suppressed research into the virus and blocked news of its spread early on. There's no reason to believe them when they tell us the date they discovered Covid.
> I understand the political implications of this (namely that Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all)
I do wonder (honestly, not rhetorically), if the virus emerged somewhere outside of China, what are the odds of the first major outbreak being in Wuhan? Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time?
Perhaps the presence of cases outside of China this early on simply means Covid was simmering, and spilling out, earlier than we thought.
Well, a few explanations I can think of:
1) Covid19 was circulating, but had it's first outbreak in Wuhan due to things like population density
2) Covid19 was circulating earlier than China informed the world know (I'm not claiming grand conspiracy here to keep things secret; the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while)
3) There were other coronaviruses with the same or similar proteins elsewhere.
I'm leaning towards #3. It makes a heck of a lot of sense for a lot of things unexplainable with SARS-COV2. If there was a mild cold circulating similar to SARS-COV2, but less deadly and less contagious, it'd explain a lot of the epidemiology (for example, why waves break so early, rather than infecting 70-90% of the population).
the simplest explanation is China didn't figure out what was happening for a while
It's even simpler than that: there was no need to figure anything out. If a few people present with flu-like symptoms but appear to suffer above average from it, Occam's conclusion would be that those people may have had an underlying condition that exacerbated the severity of their flu. There is zero need to go looking for zebra's until you identify a cluster of similar cases that all have above-average severity.
> Why did we not see major outbreaks elsewhere at the same time?
It's a difficult question to answer (and ask?), and we may never find the real answer. Coincidence, chance, luck?
For now though, for all intents and purposes, Wuhan was ground zero and the first public cases in Italy and - I don't know, possibly these ones in Norway - can be traced back to Wuhan.
The Norwegian study found covid antigen in 98 out of 6520 samples.
Those 6250 samples were mostly from 2020, and the positive samples were almost entirely late 2020. Only one of the positives was from December 2019.
Ah, you are correct. IIRC the French study was a single sample.
On the other hand, I feel 98 indicates a wide spread in Norway and probably in whole Europe. But that doesn't match the picture we had in EU around January-February.
This is an insane proportion and the virus would have been picked up much earlier in a place like Norway which does lots of testing and flu sampling.
98/6520 is about 1.5 percent. What is the false-positive rate for the antigen tests? Have the affected blood samples been verified by PCR testing?
It’s most likely too late for PCR confirmation with these samples, there would need to be actual viral proteins in the blood sample, so an active or very recent infection at the time of the blood draw
No idea. But 98/6520 is more than 2 out of millions.
and a lot closer to 1 out of 650.
These findings aren't smoking gun evidence that "Covid19 probably did not originate from Wuhan after all".
The rumor of the "new pneumonia" was going around between doctors in Wuhan in November 2019 [1]. It's conceivable that there were people who travelled from Wuhan to Europe in November/December, and that the virus was actually in Europe before it was officially found.
Of course it could've come via humans from somewhere else to Wuhan (a good scientist doesn't dismiss hypotheses), but for sure the first outbreak was there.
It seems to me that the death rate and transmissability of the wuhan strain of covid means it is unlikely it was around in other countries prior to its discovery in china, the deaths would have been noticed. Is it more likely that a less lethal strain was circulating, a few people developed antibodies, then it mutated in wuhan to become the more deadly version?.
This would explain early antibodies, the lack of corresponding deaths in europe,but we also know how easy this thing mutates now.
I agree with your argument. Wuhan strain may not be the first one which jumps from animals to human, but surely the first one to cause widely spread infection.
This is very difficult to say.
In many countries COVID has not been a particularly deadly disease. Large numbers of recorded deaths "with COVID" obscure this but e.g. 2021 in the UK was about as deadly as 2015, 2020 was about as deadly as 2007 and in Sweden 2020 was about as deadly as 2012. So in all cases similar levels of death have been within the living memory of children. That is biased upwards and confounded by lockdown and healthcare-restriction deaths also, of course. ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities, so if China had never announced COVID, if mass testing had never started, if there'd been no panic, it's not totally clear to what extent it'd have surfaced into the public consciousness in Europe. It'd probably have been noticed by doctors and specialists.
Now, in the USA things are worse. It's still not really explained why, but most likely due to obesity levels. Also USA stats are hard to work with because overall mortality had been going up for quite some time before COVID unlike in other places where it was slowly falling, so there are maybe deeper underlying problems there that this exposed.
But let's put all that to one side. The question of how long SARS-CoV-2 has been around gets into the question of what a 'strain' is. This is a question of semantics and how virology classifies viruses.
Unfortunately here things get very murky. There is a classification system for viruses that tries to decide if they are a 'variant' of SARS-CoV-2 called Pango. It takes as given that SARS-CoV-2 originates in Wuhan and all detected variants must be slottable into a family tree derived from two original sequences found there. There are some rules about how to do that but they are being frequently changed and this tree can, it seems, go on forever, as there's no rule that says "anything mutated more than X from the original Wuhan sequence is a different strain". All the rules are relative to entries already in the tree. So it's possible that according to virology there will never be a time when SARS-CoV-2 isn't endemic even if its behaviour and RNA changes totally. Additionally, COVID is defined as "presence of any variant classed by Pango as SARS-CoV-2". Thus the symptoms of COVID as a disease can also change totally without it ever being declared gone.
Arguably this is already happening with Omicron.
So ultimately the state of play in the public health/virology world is such that the papers claims can't really be evaluated precisely. For that you'd need a precise RNA-based definition of what SARS-CoV-2 actually is, and/or a precise clinical definition of what COVID is, but no such definitions exist.
> ONS claims only about ~17,000 deaths in the UK over the two years are pure COVID with no other comorbidities
I dont think this is material, covid kills a lot of people with comorbidities, and there are a lot of people with comorbidities. You can see it extremely clearly in the all cause mortality, the peaks line up with the peaks in covid diagnoses. You would never miss that many extra deaths. New york hospitals were a lot more full than usual during the first wave. There is no hiding that.
And countries like australia, who have had very low covid infections, but have had lockdowns, have shown not even a blip in all cause mortality. So lockdowns are not the thing causing deaths, its the covid.
"covid kills a lot of people with comorbidities, and there are a lot of people with comorbidities"
Yes undoubtably, but the question is to what extent those deaths would have been recorded as COVID in the absence of mass hysteria. In the UK COVID was very rapidly put on the "notifiable diseases" list which makes how cases/deaths are reported and classified much more aggressive.
Consider that the average age of a COVID death is over 80, it's actually over the average life expectancy. For many of these cases they'd actually be either asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms, and if COVID had been treated as a normal respiratory outbreak then it'd never have been made notifiable meaning the recorded cause of death would be different.
"You would never miss that many extra deaths"
Who is "you"? People who study mortality stats would have noticed it and it'd be ascribed to a coronavirus outbreak, but would the average person have noticed anything? The difference in mortality between now and (say) 2012 is so small that you'd not know it existed if the media/government weren't telling everyone about it every day. If I think about my own life, I don't know a single person in two years who's died, not even one that's been hospitalized. Lots of people who got it, of varying ages, but it was just a rough few days and then they always recovered.
In another world, this could have passed without me ever knowing anything was happening. It's just not directly observable by the vast majority.
"And countries like australia, who have had very low covid infections, but have had lockdowns, have shown not even a blip in all cause mortality. So lockdowns are not the thing causing deaths, its the covid."
Parts of Australia have done yes, but they didn't tell people they had a moral duty to not go to hospital, or flood care homes with infected people. "Lockdowns" is a term that encompasses a lot of really stupid stuff governments did, especially at the start.
The article mentions December 2019, I found another article [1] showing SARS-CoV-2 as early as September 2019 in Italy.
From the article: "A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”.
It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
It looks like the proposed Covid-19 antibody find for Italy from 2019 is not uncontested among the science community, here is a comment from virologist Marion Koopmans [1], who was trying to validate the study's results:
"Yrs, we tried. Sofar have not been able to confirm. Serology in low prevalence situations is challenging so our criteria are stringent ( triple antigen positive and neutralisation). With that no positives pre march 2020 in our country and sofar not in panel from italy"
[1] https://twitter.com/MarionKoopmans/status/141665264260494541...
English version: https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/covid-19-was...
Note this article is just a rehash of a Sputnik article. Sputnik is the prime example of a propaganda outlet and well known for pushing wrong, madr up or heavily biased and unreflective articles (also known as 'fake news' in the original sense of lies and deception, rather than the modern American 'things I don't like are fake news' sense).
I have not read the original paper so cannot comment on substance, but don't believe a word of this.
I already read the submitted article using Google Translate, and the article I linked here basically contains the same information, just in English. You can confirm this by simply reading the original with the help of Google Translate.
My partner and myself got very sick on holiday in Germany, December 2019. Didn't think too much of it, until the symptoms of Covid started getting published and they all sounded eerily familiar. By the time antibody tests were available in my country it was too late. But no doubt in my mind it was covid. This just adds evidence to that fact
But the symptoms of covid are very similar to e.g. the flu, and this would make you and your partner some of the first people on Europe to have had covid (given exponential increase in case counts it cannot have circulated for long before early 2020). My prior on anybody having covid in Europe in Dec 2019 is extremely low, I think yours should be too - just having been really sick is no evidence at all.
I know half a dozen people who say the same. I wouldn't give this too much importance. The flu feels very similar to Covid. When I had Covid, I thought I had a normal cold with allergies. I don't think you can assume you had it because of similar symptoms.
There are hundreds of similar diseases, in particular in the set of flu strains that are endemic. These can hit you hard with very similar symptoms.
maybe you're right. but loss of taste and smell. sick for 2 weeks and symptoms that persisted for 6+ months, obviously can't prove anything, but everything was suspiciously similar to covid. So it doesn't surprise me to see covid being found in dec 2019 samples in europe
I cannot claim any special expertise on this but the CDC lists loss of taste and smell as a common symptom of flu and covid.
"Change in or loss of taste or smell, although this is more frequent with COVID-19."
ya didn't know this, thanks for the link
Yes, i used to lose my sense of smell once or twice a year during a sickness well before covid.
I had a cold two weeks ago and I lost much of my taste and smell. However, lab test said I was negative for Covid19.
I think I just haven't thought about how colds influence taste before Covid19 sympthoms became known. I have always thought that snot blocked the smell like mechanically, not that the virus actually made the nose not work properly.
interesting, didn't know non-covid flu strains effected taste and smell
Small nitpick, but COVID and flu are not the same type of virus - coronaviruses are separate from influenza.
Yeah, my mum got pretty sick in January 2020 as well; it might have been covid, it might have been seasonal flu, at this point we may never know.
Anyway two years later now and it's my turn, yay. At least I'm vaccinated and it seems to be fairly mild by now.
Anecdata, not sure who to report this to for investigative purposes:
1. Teresa from Rako Science saliva testing station used to work as Air New Zealand cabin crew. With 5 other crew members, they went to Shanghai, and also stayed in the Grand Hyatt hotel opposite Taipei 101 in October 2019.
They went to a nearby night market, presumably Taipei Hwahsi Tourist Night Market (which I went to on 2009-09-04, and had a lovely time).
After that visit, they all had a respiratory infection similar to a bad flu, which didn't clear up after the doctor provided steroids and iron supplements, and they have had recurrences since then, roughly every 4 months.
They're pretty sure in retrospect that they know what it was.
To my knowledge, this is earlier than any confirmed WHO reports, at least as far as Wikipedia goes.
2. Mum reports that mum & dad's neighbours also report a bad flu in October/November 2019 in the Pays de Gex, near Geneva, Switzerland.
«bad flu» -> «swine flu»
This is nonsense. There are plenty of diseases with similar symptoms.
I will report your post as probable astroturfing, the weird detail without actual evidence or source and pointing to Taipei suggests makes evident your motives. There is no substance or value to this post, except to.spread unfounded and untraceable conspiracy theories.
Apparently you don't realize this, but peterburkimsher has some personal connections to Taiwan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400350
I'd like to say that jumping from a single post to conclusions about the posters motives makes something evident about you, but I don't feel like looking at your posting history to find out what it could be.