Wouldn’t they just think that an “influenze-like illness” was just this year’s mutation of influenza?
“Wouldn’t they just think that an “influenze-like illness” was just this year’s mutation of influenza?”
That depends. If doctors or hospitals send for a lab test, the lab tests are normally looking for all the different virus families familiar to medicine as causing “seasonal flu” cases. The annual mutations do not detract from the analysis, because enough of what is common to a virus, through all its mutations, remains.
As the report said, the mystery cases reported to the CDC had lab tests that did not identify any of the usual suspects, in spite of the symptoms being common to ILI.
The spikes in Texas and Washington in late 2019 in particular suggests a spike in ILI (influenza linked illness) with a high proportion of those cases NOT identifiable to the usual seasonal flu bugs. THAT only would suggest quite a number of cases were related to “somthine else” and if not Covid-19 then what?
The questions deserve official investigation.