'I was traveling through VA at approximately the same time. I’m originally from MD, and have been living in AL for the last 21 years. I believe I left on the 22nd. The weather was miserable all the way up to the VA Welcome Center on I-81, and I stopped to use the rest area there. All the other restrooms along the trip were so gnarly, I used paper towels to touch anything, but I think I may have rubbed up against something in the rest area. About a day or so later I started feeling something coming on, and by the time we went to candlelight services Christmas Eve, something had fully dug in. I spent most of the next ten days with a horrible cough, sore throat, intermittent chills, and runny nose. I even coughed up a little blood because my throat was so raw. I slept 12 hours at a time. I was going through fluid like a fish. I only discovered a couple of days before I left that there was a new urgent care center in town (being 80, Mom’s memory doesn’t fire on all cylinders anymore), but decided to call my doctor in GA instead. After I explained the situation, they said the best they could do was schedule me five days out because some sort of bug had come out of nowhere and the doctors everywhere were booked to capacity. I had too much to deal with for a number of reasons, so they had to split my appointment in two in order to see everybody. When I got to my first appointment, it looked like an infirmary. He has two other doctors sharing the same family medical care center, and the waiting room was overflowing. When the nurse came and got me, she said that in all of her years of nursing, she’d never seen a waiting room that packed with patients all having the same illness. Now, he put me on prednisone to open up my airway, zythromax for the infection, and Cherrytussin (the good stuff, with the codeine, heh, heh, heh) for the cough. It cleared me up in just a few days. My sister had gotten a touch of it after I left, but nothing of the intensity I had. And nobody else around me even got a sniffle. I’m just wondering if this Kung Flu or COVID-Whatever might not have started sooner than they’re letting on, and it somehow found a pocket down here or along the eastern seaboard. All I know is, I was on a Z-Pak for five days, and I get my zinc and C vitamin from chewing a couple of gummy muti-vites in the morning. It could be nothing. It could be something. It just seemed like odd timing on the part of me and a lot of people down here that there was a flu wildfire hitting just a few weeks before this whole ‘pandemic’ broke out.'
I’ve heard that WuFlu here can be traced back to October or November 2019. FWIW...