system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How was COVID-19 discovered?

If I had the kind of symptoms that are associated with COVID-19, I’d assume I had the flu, and I’d stay in bed for a couple of days.

But presumably some people would go to the doctor with those symptoms. And I’d expect the doctor to also diagnose the flu, and tell them to stay in bed.

But at some point, someone must have gone to the doctor, and the doctor said “I know it looks like the flu but I’m not too sure so let’s do some tests”, and then the tests came back as showing it was a new variety of Coronvirus. So what would have prompted a doctor to request those tests?
gpt
It wasn’t the flu like symptoms that tipped off doctors, it was ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). Despite all the heat China has taken for their early response to the virus, they did better than probably any other country in the world would have at picking up on the fact that something was going on. A lot of the doctors there have first hand experience treating SARS, so they were able to recognize that they were seeing patients with similar symptoms. And after SARS they put into place an infectious disease surveillance system to keep track of any unexplained cases of pneumonia and raise a red flag if there’s a sudden uptick in cases from the same area.