I’m not talking about politicians or governments (who are supposed to predict how to keep us safe), I’m mean us average people.
I saw bits and pieces of what was happening in China on the news but didn’t pay much attention. I also skimmed over it in the paper, but again didn’t pay much attention. When Covid-19 hit British Columbia, I wondered how long it would take to get here, the other side of the country, from the West Coast to the best Coast.
Then my supervisor at work calls on Saturday, March 14, to tell me work is going to minimum manning for at least three weeks. Good thing I was there to take the call or I would have thought it was a joke. It still took a few days before I realized it wasn’t just us, and how things had changed regarding social distancing and self-isolation.
There was nothing like this for SARS that I recall, not even in hard hit Toronto. AIDS had no such response.
Am I the only one caught off-guard by all this?
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
Down here in OZ where I work we were watching it from mid January. When things started to hit locally we were all checking out home to work connectivity - taking the work laptop home, checking the VPN worked, access to resources all good. I think we were all set for it. The only surprise was the week we had decided to trial work from home for the whole team, three days out of five, was the week we got the call to lockdown and go home for the foreseeable future.
I remember hearing about it in late December or early January. Initially I remember saying that this would be like SARS or MERS, requiring local response but not impacting the world at large. Clearly I was wrong about that. I booked a June vacation to Europe in January, and by the end of February had resigned myself to not going.
I travel a lot, and I was doing so as normal until the first week in March. That’s when even my domestic travel screeched to a halt.
It was in my mind since January but like something in the back of my brain bugging me but not paying too much attention. But in February my daughter had this compilation of symptoms which were: low grade fever, tummy issues, and allergy symptoms (she suffers from allergies year round). That lasted on and off during the entire month and she missed some school. I took her to the pediatrician three times and the doctor said it was the flu but I asked the doctor: do you think this is Coronavirus? She replied: has she been out of the country? The answer to that was no. Since that point this has been on my mind and I started paying attention to the news. Granted, I never imagine it would turn into this colossal mess.
I had concert on March 10th I really wanted to go to.
On March 9th, I checked on it to get some info and saw that it had been rescheduled for November. No reason was given.
Although I was well aware of Covid-19, it did not occur to me that the cancellation was about Covid-19. There were no cases of it in my state at the time and I thought it would be silly to cancel a concert with no known cases.
Something interesting in China hit my radar back in December/January. In mid-February I was watching what was happening in Italy. When we started having cases in Washington state, and the first death in late-mid February, I started preparing here on the other side of the country (food, provisions etc, which was at least a couple weeks before the run on grocery supplies happened). I had relatives planning for a cruise and I convinced them to cancel.
I can do the math and knew it would be everywhere in a matter of weeks. But I work in infectious disease.
I get most of my news through Asian channels, so yeah, it was easy to see coming. There was actually tons of coverage. But events in Asia get very little news space on this UScentric, side of the world, I find. So for months here, is was a side story amounting to number of cases only, then back to the sideshow.
If you read Channel News Asia, South China Morning Post, Straits Times every morning, it’s been the dominant story for months. Lots of info, lots of detail, a steady flow.
To a point. Mid January I ordered hand-sanitizer and a bunch of extra shelf-stable groceries, early Feb I cancelled a mid-April vacation to the Caribbean Specifically because of Corona concerns. But early March I still went on a planned trip to NYC, figuring I’d be in and out before it mattered. Won’t know for sure until anti-body testing comes available, but I may have cut that too close.
For at least 5 years Bill Gates has been warning us that we are not prepared.
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[Epidemiologists have been warning about the emergence of a zoonotic viral pandemic for decades.](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/11/12/04-0789_article)
My wife is from China, and her parents live with us in the US. My in-laws get all of their news from China and whatever their friends forward them on Weibo and WeChat. They have been in panic mode since around Christmas, and started hoarding in early January.
I, OTOH, didn’t pay much attention until early March. You see, My wife and MIL have always been germophobes and internet hypochondriacs (especially MIL - her main hobby is looking up diseases online then deciding she has it), and my in-laws will believe every stupid CT their friends forward them. They have a history of crying wolf for so long that I just ignored them again. Well, this time the wolf really came.
My husband decided it was coming for us, mid January or so, just from reading mainstream US news. He’s not the type of person to get alarmed easily, but he did spend his whole career analyzing and extrapolating data. No one believed him at that point, including myself.
The lead guitarist of my band was talking about this back in December. He is the most ‘up on current events’ of the 4 of us, though it’s often from a conspiracy-theory angle. For some context, he’s a conservative leaning guy (he voted for Trump in 2016, though he claims he won’t be doing it again this time around) but hardly fits the profile, as a half-black, half-Jewish, member of an occult metal band. (The other band he’s in - not ours.) He was talking about this virus in December in the context of criticizing China. We were sitting on the porch smoking weed during a break in practice. “Did you hear about this virus that’s spreading in China? It happened because some guy cooked a stew with a bat and a snake.” Those were his exact words, I remember them verbatim. He did not elaborate on why exactly cooking a stew with a bat and a snake would cause the virus. The rest of us just sort of laughed it off and didn’t think about it again until it started really making the news.
I was watching what the CDC was saying about it, and I assumed that the nation would follow the CDC’s guidelines. I was completely blindsided when the governor decided to completely ignore those guidelines.
Stranger, I glad someone posted about Red Contagion. Most people I’ve talked to think it’s just another conspiracy theory. I’m glad to see that you’ve posted about it.
The b.s. that our government was blindsided is unbelievable.
Besides all the decades of alerts, US intel warned the Pentagon and White House in November of a cataclysmic virus. Ho hum, no problem. [political jab omitted]
I also made a planned trip to NYC in early March. Then when I came back from NY I visited my mom at her nursing home a couple of times. They asked me several screening questions including questions about out of country travel, but even on March 12, travel to NYC wasn’t a red flag. The nursing home closed to visitors on March 13th.
Then a few days later I got sick. No fever, mostly respiratory symptoms. A few weeks later I got a call from my Mom’s nursing home that she had pneumonia and a high fever and that it was touch and go.
She pulled through, she’s better now. The nursing home is telling me it wasn’t COVID, it was bacterial. But they never tested her for COVID.
So, yeah —— I really want an antibody test when they become available.
My son was kind of obsessed with this, beginning in January (maybe December?), to the point that when I went to a meeting attended by someone who had recently been traveling (Singapore, Australia) he actually suggested I not go, because of this person. He predicted everything…panic, quarantine…although not exactly as it actually happened. He thought we should have locked down a lot sooner. (He is 24 but still seems like a teenager in a lot of ways including the fact that he still knows everything and also he can eat everything.)
He also thought my husband should get out of jury duty, first week of March. At that point we were all hoping they would just cancel all court stuff. But they didn’t. Until the next week. I mean, if they could cancel Indian Wells, an outdoor venue where attendance was strictly voluntary, why not jury duty, an indoor venue where attendance was compulsory? Or the St. Pat’s parade (again outdoor, voluntary). But noooo. He got a five-day trial.
