The Curious Case of the Cracked Windshield

No you did not get COVID-19 this past winter. Here's why.

But first I wanted to start with a story about some cracked windshields.

Rewind to Bellingham, Washington. The year is 1954 in early March. A small number of residents in this community, approximately a 1-hour drive north of Seattle, started to notice small pits or holes in their windshields. This started to spread as residents discussed these findings with one another. As it started being reported to police a theory commenced that it was potentially the work of vandals using BB guns within the community. However the pitting was soon observed in the nearby Seattle, and towns of Sedro Woolley and Mount Vernon and by mid-April, appeared to have spread to the town of Anacortes on Fidalgo Island. Once it reached Seattle the so-called pitting "epidemic" was on fire. As the newspapers began to feature the story, more and more reports of pitting were called in. Motorists began stopping police cars to report damage. Car lots and parking garages reported particularly severe attacks.

Curiously, no pitting occurred on windows of homes, side windows of cars or other vertically positioned glass. "This led one observer to believe that whatever is causing the pitting," the INS reported, "is coming straight down from the sky at probably a high altitude."

In Canton, Ohio, some 1,000 residents notified police that their windshields had been "blemished in a mysterious manner," the Daily Mail of Hagerstown, Md., reported on April 17. And United Press in New York noted on April 20 that "new reports of mysterious windshield pittings came in today almost as fast as theories about what causes them." A Canadian scientist posited that the marks were made by the skeletons of minute marine creatures that had been propelled into the air by hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean.

In Utah, someone suggested that acid from flying bugs might be the source of the windshield-denting, but a Brigham Young University biologist disproved the theory, the Provo Daily Herald reported on June 27. It eventually made some residents build fallout shelters. But after all was said and done, the reality was that people were simply seeing the news and seeing pre-existing windshield damage that simply occurs from daily driving. If you'd care to do it yourself and your car is more than two years old, simply step outside into your driveway and take a really close look at your windshield. I can tell you what you're going to find.

For guidance, NPR turned to Missouri State University sociologist David Rohall, who has taught courses in social movements and collective behavior for more than a decade. "Much of what happens in society is a numbers game," Rohall says. "If you have more people, any phenomenon starts to appear more common if you focus on any one event or behavior. Even something that is very infrequent may start to appear to be a trend, he says, "when you aggregate those events. There are millions of cars in Washington state but thousands of cases of pitting. While thousands sounds like a huge phenomenon, it represents less than 1 percent of cars. If everyone is looking for and reporting it, it would appear to be a conspiracy of some sort."

I think now you see where I am going with this. Literally almost every day I come across an article on social media telling me that if I was sick this past winter, I probably already had COVID-19, I recovered, and that was a good thing because now I have antibodies and am immune. Why does this make anybody who had a big cold or flu this year immediately stop and go, "Hrm, wait a minute. Honey I think I might have had COVID already!"? Because of the above. Of course you or somebody you know really got knocked on their ass with a cold or a flu this year. That's how that works...every single year. Maybe it was really bad and you were on your couch for days. Yup, that's exactly how true influenza works. It's usually a doozy! And then the wheels in the brain start turning...

Let me highlight the major glaring problem with this theory right up front: We actually don't have any solid data yet on immunity. We don't know whether or not anybody can get re-infected, what degree of immunity any infected person has, etc. So let's just cut that idea out right now. Even if you did have "early winter COVID" it means nothing for the future at this time, though we learn more about this every day.

And the other issue with this theory is simple science. Allow me to explain. All coronaviruses, COVID-19 included are essentially a piece of RNA. It's just like DNA - and exactly how you can find out if that sibling of yours is a brother or half brother. And just like DNA testing there is RNA testing. If you contracted COVID-19 from your neighbour, it would look different than if you contracted it while overseas before the big storm hit. Not drastically different by any means, but small signatures or mutations make a big impact as far as digging goes. And just like you can draw a DNA family tree, you can draw an RNA family tree with COVID-19 and the experts have already done said timeline tree and map. Now, truth be told, new information is coming to light that it actually may have been uncovered sooner - but we are taking days and weeks here, not months and seasons. More to come. All this homework shows that the earliest Chinese cases were all closely related to each other, and the cases that popped up later across the world were descendants of those. There may be some tiny gaps in the family tree, but it has a clear origin and a clear pattern of spread. The phylogeny shows an initial emergence in Wuhan, China, in Nov-Dec 2019 followed by sustained human-to-human transmission leading to sampled infections. Additional research with multiple groups of scientists and epidemiologists have proven the same thing.

Now when you mention that to the types of people that fell the same prey to those of the Seattle windshield epidemic, an answer I've frequently heard of after explaining all the science above I just did was "Well, maybe it's because we didn't have a test for COVID back then and it was just diagnosed as the flu". Also incorrect. This flu season had some hills and valleys but it didn't have a gigantic spike which would have been the case if "early COVID" was mistakingly diagnosed as seasonal influenza. "Ah, but wait. If it was early COVID it would not test positive for seasonal influenza either". Correct. So of course we wouldn't see an uptick in seasonal influenza. But wrong again: The CDC actually tracks *all* cases of any influenza type illness through a project called ILINet. Early COVID-19 would have absolutely been caught through ILINet tracking - and there simply was no explosion this last season.

In closing, the science is clear. You or your family members may have had one hell of a cold or flu a few months ago. But it wasn't COVID-19 and you definitely are not immune. As we enter a time of re-opening across our continent this is important information to know. Stay safe. And take a quick peek at your windshield.