For context, I don’t usually get sick, and if I do, I rarely if ever get seriously sick. I’ve been seriously sick a handful of times in my life and have definitely had the flu before.

Nov. 13th, 2019, I started to come down with a pretty bad cold and left work early. My commute is along a popular train route from downtown to airport (lots of contact points during rush hour).

My kids were also not feeling well and we went into the doctors that afternoon. The reaction was typical, “you’ve caught a virus, probably the flu.” At this point my wife was fine.

For the next 5 days my fever started to increase and I was knocked out incapacitated. It was the worst that I had ever felt. I can safely say that you can eat jumbo freezies with a fever and won’t experience brain freeze. On Monday the 18th, I went back to the doctor and he listened to my chest and heard the distinctive crackling of pneumonia. He sent me for a chest x-ray and it came back positive. Immediately I was put on antibiotics. Note that I never felt in distress breathing. A few days later it wasn’t getting better, and I went back to the doctors. They increased my dose and also prescribed me a “superbug inhibitor”. I was out of commission for another week before I started to work from home and feeling better.

Doctors told me I had bacterial pneumonia. No one did any real tests, nasal swabs, or blood.

On Nov. 24th my wife came down with a terrible cold as we had plans to take our family to a theme park. This turned into a stressful trip because she came down sick mid-trip and needed Tylenol frequently.

The kids at this point had not shown any real symptoms. Only mild symptoms that came and went.

On November 30th, I went to the hospital to get checked out because I was scheduled to travel to re:Invent on Dec. 1st. The pneumonia was still present and they couldn’t tell if it were getting smaller or not (no baseline). They did take my blood though, although no one commented on it. Effectively the doctors told me I was good to travel. Doctors had conflicting opinions on whether I was contagious, or even whether I had a virus or bacterial infection. The double regime of antibiotics and “super bug inhibitor” seemed to do the trick for me.

With that in hand I made the decision to travel to Las Vegas. Note that at this point I no idea about Covid-19 but over the next few weeks the reports started to come in, but I still didn’t think about myself being sick.

At re:Invent, if you were there, I was the guy with the dry persistent cough which my doctor eventually labeled the “100-day cough” (no kidding).

The trouble began almost immediately once I returned from the trip. People I had socialized with were telling me that I made them sick. That felt terrible, and I had been at work at this time and still coughing. Out of respect for folks I decided to work from home for the next couple of weeks. The team I had sat near, then reported all coming down with a terrible cold that weekend.

This is all anecdotal of course and no one else I knew came down with pneumonia. Around mid-December I took time off until the new year and effectively sequestered with my family.

The only time I felt the pneumonia was when I exerted myself physically. It felt like pressure on my chest. It was still visible on a CT scan in March 2020 when I was admitted to hospital over a potential concern of Covid due to travel (paranoia). I tested negative for Covid via a nasal swab.

Work Travel Timeline:
- In early November to Minnesota
- In December to Las Vegas
- In January to London
- In late Feb / early March to NYC

I came home from NYC just as reports were surfacing of a man getting sick near Times Square, where I had been located.

All the while the Covid reporting / story was unfolding. The “joke” was that I was probably patient zero. This is not a funny joke.

There is some trust that our medical doctors will do the right thing and we have sentinel programs in place. What struck me about the Covid reporting was how it was presented in the Lancet and immediately became political. Doctors are reporting cases of “pneumonia with unknown origin.” This got me thinking, none of the doctors that investigated me collected blood or nasal swabs. It was all shrugged off as being “flu” or “bacterial pneumonia” a result of “flu.” IIRC there were reports of 2019/2020 being a bad flu season.

My thanks go out to the brave Chinese doctors that first identified the gene sequence and shared the data in an effort to prevent pandemic. You are heroes, even if our governments dropped the ball and we’re incapable of making tough decisions based on a lack of early and lagging data in some cases, or because they didn’t share enough data.

When we started to hear about antibody tests, and sewage testing being able to show community spread I was certain we would detect Covid in Nov/Dec in NA by looking back. I’m not convinced this testing ever really happened only because I “really expect we would find traces.”

At this point we had just entered lockdown (March 2020) and I still haven’t gotten my hair cut. We still don’t know the origins of Covid but we are all told that it started in Wuhan. The first cases were all people who had travelled to or come into contact with people from Wuhan. The serious cases were all mostly associated with elder case homes.

Was it a lab accident, or a cave, or an animal that mated with a bat from a cave? Then there is all of us who have this collective experience of thinking we had Covid back in late 2019 / early 2020. Probably not?