Until you actually have an antibody test result, be careful to equate "probably COVID-19" with "COVID-19". I have a friend who lives in the NYC metro area who was sure he had COVID-19 in March. All the symptoms matched, felt like he was dying for 6 weeks. Never tested, because tests were in short supply then, but his doctor said it was very likely COVID. He just took an antibody test and got the results yesterday. Negative for COVID-19.
Swine flu was going around this winter, which also will knock you out for a month. If you didn't specifically get a coronavirus PCR test positive, there's about a 10:1 chance that what you actually had was the flu. Outside of major hotspots like NYC and Chelsea MA, I believe the serological studies that suggest about 2-4% of the population has had coronavirus.
It’s not clear yet how reliable the antibody tests are. Antibodies fade over time, and we don’t know how long Covid-19 antibodies remain detectable in your blood. It’s quite possible that after 6 weeks or so, you’ll no longer have easily detectable levels of antibodies.
We also do not know the seroconversion rate for mild or asymptomatic cases (every study measuring this seems to use an entirely-hospitalized or mostly-hospitalized cohort).
I can't believe that people are quick to tell me that the pneumonia I had in January couldn't possibly have been COVID-19, but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
> but they say that every death since January is COVID caused.
I have no idea where you came up with this nonsense, but if anything there are academic studies demonstrating that, even in countries that do a honest job reporting covid19 deaths, Covid19 deaths have been systematically underreported.
Who, exactly, says every death since January is caused by COVID-19? I cannot find any statistics which suggest that about 20 million people have died to coronavirus this year.
You may be confusing this with excess deaths count, which is tracking the difference between deaths in a given month of 2020 and deaths in the same month in previous year (or years, averaged). Assuming no other unknown disease or phenomenon other than COVID-19 is silently ravaging our societies, this is the most reliable metric we have - as government after government has been caught on underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
But that's clearly a false assumption. It assumes hospitals can be emptied and society put under house arrest with no excess deaths as a consequence, which is not only a very strange assumption but contradicted by huge amounts of evidence.
There's by now a whole lot of people, including many experts in many domains, who are concluding the lockdown will kill more people than the disease itself. Far more if it turns out they had little impact, which there is also quite some evidence of.
You can filter out deaths by suicide and similar, of which there isn't many so far (but yes, maybe the lockdown will kill more; it hasn't now). You kind of already have to filter out things like deaths by traffic accidents, of which there's much less now.
And consider that heart attack and stroke centers are seeing precipitous drops in patient referrals, almost certainly meaning that the fear of catching COVID-19 is causing many people to avoid treatment and die at home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...
Swine flu was going around this winter, which also will knock you out for a month. If you didn't specifically get a coronavirus PCR test positive, there's about a 10:1 chance that what you actually had was the flu. Outside of major hotspots like NYC and Chelsea MA, I believe the serological studies that suggest about 2-4% of the population has had coronavirus.