Thread by @DonaldWelsh16

Happy Anniversary CoV-2. Its been an excited year with you here in Ontario and more broadly Canada.

What????

I thought CoV-2 arrived in mid March 2020. Well, that might not be the case. Shall we take a deeper look? 1/

According to Pravda, oops my bad the CBC, it all started with one person arriving in Toronto on January 25. It then of course spread like wildfire because thats what they were told. But is this really the case? 2/

cbc.ca/news/health/ca…

Unlike the CBC, classy news joints do a bit of digging and have punctured these sorts of contrived narratives. In the United States, the NYT provides a good example. 3/

nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/…

So when did it arrive in Ontario? Antedotal evidence places it in Canada likely before Christmas. Lots of stories of strange flu-like illnesses. Here are a few examples. 4/

There was a strange spike in respiratory illnesses on Jan 7, 2020 in Windsor. 5/

wrh.on.ca/newsroom?newsi…

And don't forgot Peterborough Ontario in December 2020 with that rise in strange flu-like illnesses. 6/

https://twitter.com/PRHC1/status/1212476073042173953?s=09

And how about Ottawa? Plenty of flu-like illness there as well, in late 2019 and early 2020. 7/

https://twitter.com/browe05/status/1216864328495833088?s=09

OK so what? Its flu-like illness but how do you know it might be CoV-2? Great question and for that lets look at a few figures put together by Kelly Brown @rubiconcapital_ . They are rather intriguing. 8/

OK, Coronavirus surveillance for Ontario the last 4 years. Notice the early seasonal rise in coronaviruses in every year except 2019-2020. Its like we are missing a coronavirus. When testing starts for CoV-2 in March, we see it immediately. 9/

Its rare for two coronaviruses to circulate together: one usually dominates the other. So back extrapolating to the usual starting point, one could logically assume CoV-2 arrived in early December and contributed to those respiratory illnesses noted at the end of 2019. 10/

So in retrospect, CoV-2 was likely in Ontario in December 2019 but we had no test to see it. Or did we? Back we go to an interesting plot from Kelly Brown @rubiconcapital_ 11/

This is Canadian coronavirus surveillance data 2019-2020 plotted on week 29 (left) and then again on week 30 (right). Note the correction in the ontario data from one week to the next. Its like we found some mysterious coronavirus. Hmm. 12/

Anyways, I think evidence is building that CoV-2 was readily circulating in Ontario for months prior to March. Then our leaders decided to lockdown and accelerate the death process in the LTCs. Genius level thinking by our politicians and low wattage public health officers. 13/

And now a poll. Are we on the right path? Was Cov-2 here in Ontario before Christmas 2019?