Note: This post was written during the pandemic. My views may have changed.
I'm writing this post to clarify something I put in a forum that was incorrect. But this is the explanation for why I think what I do.
See sources below.
SARS CoV 1 2002-2004 - Origin-China. 28 countries involved. Toronto had a notable outbreak in hospitals. Highly transmissible - do we think it wasn't wider spread that what they reported? Do we think the border was closed to the virus then? I do not.
MERS 2012 Origin- Saudi Arabia. Less transmissible, but more deadly than SARS CoV1.
MERS 2015 Origin- Republic of Korea. Worldwide transmission. More transmissible than 2012, but less than SARS CoV1. More deadly than SARS CoV1.
MERS was ongoing at least until 2019, according to WHO (see below).
SARS is a recurring virus that stays quiescent for years in hosts and then reemerges, like herpes, ebola, and sometimes epstein barr viruses. Recall the beginning of our pandemic, how the tests provided to states by CDC did not work correctly. Recall how the US rejected tests offered by WHO. Various state infectious disease departments had already been conducting monitoring testing for SARS and MERS years before the current pandemic. Did they use an antibody test to test for past infections or a current infection test? Where did they get the tests? We didn't have working tests at the beginning of the pandemic. And there was a proposal to test border immigrants for SARS as far back as 2013.
"WHO and colleagues from the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and Institut Pasteur* have estimated that, since 2016, [article published July 8, 2019] 1 465 cases of Middle East Respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and between 300 and 500 deaths may have been averted due to accelerated global efforts to detect infections early and reduce transmission.
In 2012, a novel virus that had not previously been seen in humans was identified for the first time in a resident from Saudi Arabia. The virus, now known as MERS-CoV, has, as of 31 May 2019, infected more than 2 442 people worldwide."
http://www.emro.who.int/health-topics/mers-cov/mers-outbreaks.html
"At the end of December 2020, a total of 2566 laboratory-confirmed cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), including 882 associated deaths (case-fatality rate: 34.37%) were reported globally. The majority of these cases were reported from Saudi Arabia (2167 cases), including 804 related deaths with a case-fatality rate of 37.1%."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4687304/
"Emergence of SARS and MERS SARS first emerged in late 2002 in Guangdong Province, southern China, as a novel clinical severe disease (termed “atypical pneumonia”) marked by fever, headache and subsequent onset of respiratory symptoms including cough, dyspnea and pneumonia. Being highly transmissible among humans, SARS rapidly spread to Hong Kong and other provinces across China and then to other 28 countries [6, 7]. By July 2003, it had caused 8096 confirmed cases of infection in 29 countries, 774 (9.6 %) of which were fatal (http://www.who.int/csr/sars/country/table2004_04_21/en/). The second outbreak in 2004 only caused 4 infections with no mortality nor further transmission [8]. The MERS epidemic emerged in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) since June 2012, with a similar clinical syndrome to SARS but seemingly less transmissible. In addition to respiratory illness, renal failure was identified in some severe cases [9–11]. Unlike SARS which had numerous super-spreader events, most MERS cases were independent clusters and limited to countries in the Middle East, particularly in KSA. Limited MERS cases have been reported in African and European countries and the United States of America, but exclusively in individuals travelling back from the Middle East. Some patients were reported to have a history of contact with camels while many other cases lacked this epidemiological link [9–11]. The MERS pandemic in the Republic of Korea in 2015 was caused by a single person who returned from travel in the Middle East. This made the Republic of Korea to be home to the second largest MERS epidemic with a total of 185 confirmed cases and 36 deaths [11, 12]. By 18 August 2015 a total of 1413 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS have been reported worldwide with a median age of 50 years, including 502 related deaths. The mortality of MERS (approximately 35 %) is much higher than that of SARS (around 10 %)."
The studies below, make two questionable conclusions. The first Italian study concludes that the SARS antibodies present in samples taken before the pandemic must mean the pandemic started before they thought. That is possible. Another explanation that can't be excluded, is that people had previously been exposed to "a" coronavirus that provided them a significant antibody response. Which coronavirus, a previously undetected SARS or MERS, or a seasonal corona-cold virus is unknown. The second study found very good Tcell antibody responses to SARS CoV2 in samples collected from 2015-2018. Again, they conclude that it must be due to exposure to previous seasonal coronaviruses. That is possible. However, the antibody responses they detected in the older samples before the pandemic are so robust that it begs the question - why are the Chinese and Russian vaccines seemingly less effective than the antibody response seen by people who had the common cold version of corona virus? I think, it's possible those 2015-2018 people obtained their immune response from an undetected SARS outbreak (2002-2004, 2012, 2013, 2015), from a SARS virus, while not in it's present, more lethal variation, may have already circulated globally, providing some level of immunity to more people that we realize.
This study looked at previously collected lung tissue samples and found antibodies in September 2019 before the pandemic supposedly started.
"SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) in the second week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. "
The full article is published in Cell and can be found on the La Jolla Immunology Institute's website.
"The teams also looked at the T cell response in blood samples that had been collected between 2015 and 2018, before SARS-CoV-2 started circulating. Many of these individuals had significant T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2, although they had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. But everybody has almost certainly seen at least three of the four common cold coronaviruses, which could explain the observed crossreactivity."
And finally, this study found plenty of COVID negative controls in samples from 2015. So, are they saying those controls were never exposed to regular common cold and show no cross-reactivity? Why before 2015?
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/8/4/684/htm
"Serum samples from 9 healthy, COVID-19-negative individuals that were obtained before December 31, 2015 were used as negative controls. ... We saw no reactivity to the SARS-CoV-2 proteins in the negative controls "
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