Wrong,
Magnus McGinty was right, the first cases in the UK were in York at the end of Jan., followed by Brighton in early Feb.
First detected cases at that time, not really the first cases at all. I wish we had a better picture of the real first cases, their timing and the initial seeding picture in general.
Likewise even the first reported deaths werent really the first ones, and those started showing up only once we actually bothered to look for severely ill cases using a broader methodology, going well beyond the ridiculously narrow criteria that enabled officialdom to spend far too long only looking at people who matched a particular travel history. I probably droned on about 'seek and you shall find' at the time and sure enough, as soon as they started looking more closely deaths were reported.
Thanks to one person insisting on tissue samples being investigated months later, we do have one confirmed Covid death from the end of January 2020. Which acts as a simple demonstration that the reality in terms of early cases was quite different to the perceptions we got from formal identification and reporting of the 'first' cases in late January and deaths quite some time later at the end of Feb/early March. Deaths from earlier community transmission were already happening by the time we were just getting round to spotting those first few isolated, travel related positive cases.
Peter Attwood died on the 30 January 2020 but his cause of death wasn't officially discovered until seven months later.
news.sky.com
Because that example of an earlier covid death was eventually formally recorded, it does show show up on the official dashboard in the death certificate deaths by date of death data. As does a second one a few days later which I know much less about. It is unlikely thrse were really the first deaths either, just the first we later identified with the benefit of hindsight.
Anyway sorry to be a bore about that, its just I am reminded that this sort of thing, the difference between formal identification and early rhetoric compared to the reality of infectious disease spread, is one of the main reasons I had something vaguely useful to say back in the early months of the pandemic. And I was still inevitably behind the curve back then too, since my understanding of the limitations of our surveillance, and the bullshit about containment, still could not fully compensate for a lack of detail about the true picture at the time, and the timing gap between this disease emerging in humans and us being told about it by China etc. Hopefully as a result of what happened back then, some people were at least left with a better sense of how far behind the curve the reporting and general perceptions can get, and learnt not to place too much weight in reassuring talk about containment and being on top of things that the daily news cycles and public health rhetoric often delivers to start with. Likewise recognising the difference between the real first cases and the first formally identified cases.
There are diseases where the lag between reality and perceptions/surveillance does not end up having insurmountable consequences, but Covid wasnt one of those. And I suppose that was the main basis for me being pretty confident that my 'pessimism' and warnings back then were actually realism, and that there was going to be quite the reality check once people realised that they had been given the wrong impression about wave timing, scale of seeding and prospects for containment for way too long in those crucial early months. And so I'm afraid when I see people now return to using the same sort of language about 'first cases', I feel the need to make tedious post like this one. Whether that matters much in this monkeypox thread remains to be seen. Since it was easier to know what would happen in the UK with the covid outbreak because by the time we talked about that virus we'd already seen what was happening in Wuhan, we got an idea of how easily transmission could occur and the extent to which an outbreak could really scale up. I dont have that sort of guide with this monkeypox outbreak yet, far from it. We can see some 'seek and you shall find' going on now in terms of more countries detecting monkeypox cases, but I still cant run all that far with predictions. But we can at least be mindful of the lag between detection, perceptions and disease spread reality. At least the period where inappropriate reassurances about cases all being travel-related and no signs of community transmission were not clung to for very long with this monkeypox in the UK, how the story is being reported has evolved quite rapidly, and the symptoms are reasonably distinct enough to further aid detection.
www.leparisien.fr
