I cancelled summer vacation plans back in early February when the first cases started to hit locally. Started slowly building up supplies shortly after that. It was not hard for me to see what was coming, but I have taken courses in epidemiology so…
The most surprising thing to me was the denial that occured. Sure, you expect the usual nutcases and idiot rightwing politicians and religious crazies, but there were some intelligent (?) folks in my circle who could just not wrap their heads around exponential growth. I blame the fact they slept through math, or thought it “unimportant”.
This is the final stake in the heart of the belief in psychics. Did a single psychic predict this?
I thought 9/11 took care of this.
I saw a headline on CNN back in December and made a comment to my mom that headlines like that always make me nervous because that’s how it always starts in all the books I read. It was just a joke, though, and I didn’t really think anything was happening that would affect us here in the U.S.
I didn’t really start paying attention until mid-February, when I told my husband I thought we should start buying some extra supplies. I thought I was probably being paranoid, but we went ahead and stocked up our prescription meds and basic food staples.
If you haven’t read it, please get Randy Shiltz’s book, And the Band Played On. It details the absolute failure of the US government to do any damn thing about the AIDS epidemic. The disease spread across the United States EXACTLY how the CDC predicted, and the numbers of infected people were about what the CDC projected. And people died. And people continued to die. And even more died.
The government behaved shamefully.
So, COVID-19 is not a surprise at all to me. Trump trying to talk over Dr Fauci as he’s explaining the epidemiology is no surprise. Trump trying to force his own timetable on the disease’s progress is no surprise.
Even the idiot kids dancing and cavorting on the beaches for Spring Break were no surprise.
Trump delivering goods to the states from the Federal stockpile, and the goods consisted of disintegrating masks and nonfunctional ventilators … again, no surprise.
I just wonder how deadly the next pandemic will be?
~VOW
In October 1992, The New Yorker published Crisis in the Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, and later, he turned this into a book called The Hot Zone. It’s about Ebola and not a pandemic influenza but it goes to show that we knew something like this was possible. And in 2006-7, the US government had a plan to build 70,000 ventilators to stockpile, but that plan fell apart when the company they were working with was bought out.
In short, no one should have been surprised by this.
I don’t remember exactly when, but I heard an interview on NPR with a epidemiologist who said there’s evidence of asymptomatic transmission. My alarm bells went off. He ended by saying we’ve never seen an epidemic spread via asymptomatic transmission, so it would be an unlikely scenario. My alarm bells went nuts. I thought this would be bad at that point.
I just went back and looked. I asked my friend, who was living in China at the time, how he was feeling about the coronavirus thing on February 4th. (He was in a different city unaffected and returned to the states a few days later… to Seattle.) It had been on my radar for a while at that point.
Late in February, the first case with unknown transmission was reported. That’s when I knew we were screwed.
Around March 11th to 13th, starting with the NBA, the NHL, then fucking everything. Damn. We’re fucked.
We can assume that any American claiming psychic powers who didn’t predict 9-11 is a traitor or a fraud. All self-proclaimed psychics should have been hanged. We can assume that current psychics who didn’t predict pandemics in their nations are traitors or frauds. Yet fortune-tellers and astrologers still infest communities and commercial media. It’s not safe to hang-em now because contagion. Feed-em to alligators, who are immune.
OP: Did I personally expect a new virus to sweep the world? Not specifically in time, place, or type, it’s no surprise. I needn’t even entertain bioweapon conspiracy fantasies. Merely plot the trends. I fear we’ll see new global pandemics every few years. Trust me.
Again, I refer to And the Band Played On. AIDS had the longest pre-infection phase of any disease ever known. From time of exposure until full-blown infection was measured in YEARS. And for many of those years, the person was asymptomatic!
COVID-19 is new. Who knows what the latency period actually is? And some doctors are talking about a second “surge,” expected to occur in the late fall.
Coronaviruses are notorious for mutation.
We’re probably in deep, deep shit.
~VOW
I mentioned it on this board, the end of January. This board for the most part was ignoring it in the beginning.
OK, assume that you’re correct, and “this board for the most part was ignoring it in the beginning”. What could we have done, what should we have done, had we not ignored it? Seems to me, not much different from what we did do.
(Personally I regret not stocking up on N95 masks and a few other items.)
I started carrying masks and gloves in my backpack since the end of January. I had a flight to Vegas on the 24th and had been reading about Covid-19 and stocked up even though I knew that the likelihood was low I would run into sick people on the plane. They are still there; I have been working from home for 4 weeks now (in Colorado).
I deal with freight but mostly air freight. The day I saw delivery problems due to China shutting down flights I went out and bought TP. I figured China would have to be in serious trouble for them to shut down airports and cities.
I also started asking management about a work-at-home contingency plan. they seemed to be on top of it. We beat the governor’s mandate by a week. And before we moved and the stores shut down I bought a router interface. Also bought an infrared temperature reader.
Not sure if I bought enough liquor and definitely not enough limes.
Oh, and I also went to the doctor and got scripts for 6 months worth of my medicines.
I remember your thread. I was going to make some post saying ‘not concerned’, but didn’t.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=889217&highlight=coronavirus
But yeah a lot of us didn’t take it seriously.
I guess for me, I didn’t realize how different from SARS it was. Since we were able to keep SARS under control I figured we could do it for COVID19. I didn’t know that SARS only became contagious after you showed symptoms, but COVID19 could be spread for days or weeks before symptoms, and something like 1/5 of people are asymptomatic carriers.
Also a disease that kills 1% of people doesn’t sound that threatening, until you understand that up to 5-6 billion people could get it, which means 50-60 million deaths globally.
At first I didn’t think we’d be hit very hard, or that medication would be found soon. Then the cruises came in with infected people. Then we had 100s of cases but no real test or plan. I figured they would limit crowds to around 50 people in theaters, bars, restaurants for a while. Probably keep those infected at a private hospital. The weekend before St. Patty’s looked like there would be restrictions and that Sunday afternoon (15th) Gov. Newsom (CA) announced non-essential businesses will be closed starting Monday the 16th.
Our neighborhood bar got crowded that Sunday and people were pissed they had to close down at midnight. So I went from, “Eh, won’t be so bad” to “Holy shit, we’re gonna have to drink at home! How will we play Golden Tee?!?!”
I remember vaguely wondering, back in January, I think, if this was what the people at the beginning/prelude to various pandemic works in fiction were feeling. You know, the beginning of I Am Legend where they’re showing various news clips and such as a background to the main film?
And then got on with my day-to-day concerns.
Answer to the thread question is:
I saw on facebook someone said a book by fraud Sylvia Browne called end of days has a passage saying a virus was coming around 2020
Up until things flip-flopped seemingly overnight, most of our national news dealt with whatever Trump was doing. Didn’t matter that we’re in a different country. Things changed before I realized it.
My parents, both in their early 80s, were also surprised, and they were children during WWII and have seen many other things in their lifetime.
Friends at work and I would joke about how one specialized virus could really take us out, acknowledged the sad truth of that idea, and went back to work. Nothing we could do about it.
She also predicted scores of other provably wrong things in the same book. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. And in this case her prediction about the illness in 2020 was factually wrong in several aspects.