Absolutely true, but I remember when it was thought to be a strictly gay disease (gay cancer, it was called) and no one was sure how it was spread. Then it was thought to be the problem of gays and junkies only.
We used to get warnings about it in high school, about '84.
Things have changed greatly since then, but people still get it (and not just in poorer countries). It changed the world.
There’s a reason he’s a billionaire and I’m not. 
I posted on March 12, that I feared Australia wasn’t handling travel from the USA correctly. So it was about a week before that I started seriously thinking of the USA as an “infected country”.
And by March 1, it was already too late, the USA should have been testing and isolating all through February. So yes, I was clearly caught off guard.
Thread Is anyone else concerned with this new virus in China that is becoming a bigger problem every day? was started January 23, so clearly some people weren’t as blasé as I was.
I still can’t believe it. I would have bet my house that nothing short of nuclear war could cause the NCAA basketball tournament to be cancelled.
You know, if W could figure that out for himself, nobody gets a pass on saying, “Nobody could have known.”
Stranger
I knew there was a virus in China, but the story Apple warns China virus will cut iPhone production, sales from February 17th was when I starting thinking this will be a big thing (and when I should have pulled out some of my 401K money). Even if the virus never spread outside of China, it was apparent that it would impact major portions of the world-wide economy.
Is that a shot at W?
I’ve posted this before, but while I was aware of it fairly early on, my Taiwanese friends were much more concerned because of their experience with SARS.
I like W’s analogy with forest fires.
I started worrying in January. In February, I turned into Cassandra “Bad times are coming, better get ready!”. About the beginning of March, I turned into the Ancient Mariner, grabbing people by their collars and demanding that they listen to me. Par levels on all of our supplies were stocked and then over filled. I wanted 80_something MIL to come and stay for the duration, but she had other plans and poo-pooed my concerns. My spouse rolled his eyes, but used it as an excuse to buy more guns and ammo.
We have enough TP and paper towels that I was able to fill a box and send to MIL without worrying about shorting our home.
I would much rather that folks could continue making fun of us preppers than have this happen.
And while I knew it was going to be bad, I had no idea it was going to be this BAD.
No, it’s a shot at anyone saying this was something unpredictable.
Ah, I see. I thought it was something like ‘if even that guy could see it, then everyone should be able to see it’.
I was caught unawares by both the number of deaths and the shocking speed. I blame myself. All the signs were there. Years ago when I followed the news more seriously I would have picked up on it sooner.
Then one morning I woke up and saw that over seven hundred people died in Italy in a single day. Only then did I begin to understand the size of this disaster.
I have been following this since January thinking it was going to get very bad.
I didn’t really take any action until the last week of February when I removed the small amount of money I have in the stock market and stocked up on non-perishables (plus other products including toilet paper)–not a lot, just a two to three months stockpile.
I was worried about it before most people, partly because I am a huge fan of the Soderbergh movie. But I got into a really big thing with my kids’ principal about his policy of high-fiving every kid entering the school. :smack: Then a couple weeks later they were closed altogether.
But I would be surprised if anyone could beat this guy. Steve Silberman (whose book my wife bought years ago) tweeted in May 2017:
That’s…pretty good.
March 15th, 2016, Art Caplan: Details a scenario where a China started pandemic plays out under Trump
Well, Bush likes to read and doesn’t suffer from Dunning-Kruger.
That’s pretty good, although it’s interesting to note that it seems reversed in many ways: despite there being only “hundreds of deaths” (which truly would be a fairly small death toll compared to the seasonal flu), Trump overreacts and tries to implement forced quarantines that states and localities resist. Although it’s later, Silberman’s 2017 prediction of a pandemic being “Trump’s Katrina” (which implies doing too little in the face of mass devastation) seems closer to the target.
I think I saw this coming in late January early February. I talked to enough Koreans to know this was a big deal back then.
This.
And actually a lot of the public advice was saying well into March that transmission from asymptomatic people was rare.
I didn’t start thinking there might really be a problem in the USA until early March. I’ve known for a long time, theoretically, that a bad pandemic could do a huge amount of damage; but the early coverage didn’t incline me to think that this was significantly different from SARS or Ebola, both of which were brought under control without world wide emergency measures.
Channel News Asia posted their 100Th straight day of covid coverage today.
Both thorough and extensive from the beginning, coverage mapping it’s every step through Asia and out into the rest of the world. it was clear it would be a pandemic, even in early days. If you’d been reading a single SEAsian news source, wide coverage was literally everywhere.