Yes I have....3 or 4 times...usually cuaght from kids since they tend not to wash hands and touch everything around them and at a time when I used to ride the subway/metro. Most co workers are quite the same. Not sure your point.... Flu spreads mostly because most people are really bad at staying home when sick or practicing simple germ hygiene and people like me and you and your wife end up catching it.
CDC says of influenza "Most healthy adults may be able to infect others beginning 1 day before symptoms develop and up to 5 to 7 days after becoming sick." I've had flu, believe I had Covid though is was improbably early however this bloody phlegm was not TB and I coughed up a pint of it plus lost my sense of smell and everything else. I prefer flu. A lot.
Yes, the flu is caught because some one spread it but it is not because they were "dirty" as you mentioned above. You can have it for a bit before you know it and you have already spread it to someone else. Covid is probably the same.
I too wonder if I have already had Covid. Last winter around Dec 25th, 2019, (Kind of a weird Xmas present), I became sick and could not tell whether it was a cold or the flu. Whatever it was, it was nasty. The whole house ended up getting it. My son was really sick and ended up in the ER where they gave him antibiotics which seemed to make it worse so he quit taking them. It took him longer than the rest of us to get better. That bloody phlegm looks nasty as hell. You might of had it also.
By "Dirty" means coughing into your hands and then touching things without washing your hands....or touching surfaces out in public and then touching your face etc... does not mean you are homeless on the side of the road sitting in your own feces.... If COVID taught us anything it was to be more careful that way which as a by product will severly reduce the flu cases going forward (though not sure about most Americans sticking with simple flu hygiene protocols...)
Okay I get it. You weren't talking about dirty people doing dirty things. For myself, I am OCD about washing my hands so I don't get bugs from other people. I do not cherish being sick. So when I catch something, it has to come from the air or something.
We are prone to get things in general, we rarely keep track of everything we touch, but I go out of the house and hold on to the handrail on the escalator to go to the store, i grab the cart and push it around, someone's cart is in front so I move it politely to the side and slide on by etc....I bet in all of that I touched my nose or mouth incidentally without even thinking about it. It is basically how those viruses spread on cruise ships. Most of us get pink eye from touching our eyes after touching something innocently haha But this time around with COVID, i got to admit I have become OCD. Not touching the hand rails, wiping the cart down before I take it, avoiding using my hands to open doors (just the pinky if needed), using hand sani everytime I get back in the car or leave a place etc.. I bet if we all did that regularly we would reduce a lot of colds/flus/viruses. When COVID becomes a minor nuisance, will people go back to casually touching everything with no regard or will we all get a little OCD
There are tons of stories of weird flu or severe illnesses that popped up in DEC- MAR. If you got something nasty when you usually had run of the mill cold or flu begs the question of whether COVID was here a lot earlier and came in like a Trojan Horse during Flu season. Now it could just be a weird new strain of FLU that popped up also that further clouds the matter. But no way to go back a year and see what you might have had now that we have testing but interestingly enough you like many were able to fight it off. Since it takes time for a virus to spread, and if it indeed was here in some minor forms in DEC-JAN, then it must have popped up a few months before in China before it started being carried overseas... Maybe even Sept 2019...
I was ill from ~Dec 27th - later January before I felt entirely clear. I have heard from two cousins, one in England, me in Colombia, several more I believe were sincere from groups. Its pretty documentary investigation worthy I believe, the weird virus, just like Covid before it should have been possible. My father-in-law had it, gave it to me in the car. I isolated from other people immediately and so did my father-in-law under pain of me kicking his butt. This is because of my hospice volunteering work, I always isolate. Nobody else visiting (over 20 people) caught it from either of us. Dry nose, powerful headache, leg cramps, loss of smell (just a few days), diarrhea (never had with flu) and lots of it for 2-3 days (took a lot of Entrogermina mind you), wet nose starts but not much, coughing starts, could not catch my breath several times, fever kept surging to 104.5F, kept coming back randomly even after the first week.. To get that lot I would have had to have several tropical diseases in parallel and series and I was tested for all of them plus TB. I probably should get a PCR but I expect too late. Now Colombia has a LOT of Chinese road builder firms, otherwise very few living here unlike Panama which has huge numbers of Chinese. It could easily have got here early. Of course by anyone else coming here. Whatever it was, not the flu, I've had malaria which was only a little more unpleasant (not possible to confuse the two though).