I went to the Mayor’s office for a scheduled hearing. It was pushed back an hour or so because the Mayor and his staff were meeting with police and military personnel going over plans in the event of a lockdown.
That had never happened before. I know, I asked around.
This must have been mid to late Feb.
Februrary 2. That was the day two overseas visitors to my city tested positive. This was the sign that it was no longer a re-run of SARS, and that the spread was on the cusp of global.
Before then I was more concerned that we would see a repeat of problems we saw with SARS, which in Australia meant that the local education industry was going to see a serious cash flow problem as the overseas students vanished. The local exposure to this risk has always been ridiculously high.
Early March, I think. Before then we’d only had a small smattering of cases, and I assumed the travel ban was going to be sufficient protection against it getting a toehold in Australia
So not right
Mid January when they confirmed human to human transmission, locked down Wuhan and at the same time reported that it was all over the world.
In terms of “merely” taking it seriously, when the news out of China started getting scary.
But in more direct, personal, uh-oh, “It’s here now.” terms, then the shopping trip I made about 2 weeks ago.
I stopped visiting with my elderly parents a month ago.
I stopped leaving the house 2 weeks ago.
When try shut the pubs.
I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until March. As of March 2nd I was telling my wife to tell her brother to cancel plans to visit NYC the next week. I was still think we would use the the week to visit some local stuff. So clearly I wasn’t treating it really serious until around March 7th.
When my husband bought two gallons of hand sanitizer and a blood oxygen sensor. That was the last week in January. He told me that from what he could tell there was no way China was going to contain the virus, it was going to spread worldwide, and that deaths could be in the millions. I thought he was overreacting for a couple weeks.
When I first hear the term “wet market” in the description of a novel disease in Wuhan China. I knew that some bug had jumped species. Again.
I started a thread 1/29 on this board titled ‘How concerned are you about Coronavirus’. I was concerned then and for the most part this board wasn’t concerned, then POW!
I’ve been following the news since mid-February just as a curiosity but I also thought it was going to be “someone else’s problem” for a shamefully long time. All other epidemics I’ve lived through, even those that have made it to the US, were eventually isolated. I thought for a long time that it would be a Seattle problem, maybe a NYC problem, and then it would be contained and that would be that. I went to my drill weekend 7/8 March thinking that it probably wasn’t smart to get a bunch of random people together in a tight room, I also naively tried to buy some hand sanitizer that weekend.
But I know the exact date I realized my local hospital was destined to be overrun. 12 March, I looked at the NYT map of known cases I realized that the US had completely failed to act, it was already everywhere and there wasn’t going to be any localized isolation. There were only 5 cases in Ohio on that day but that’s when I knew there would be thousands or tens of thousands here in a matter of weeks. Later that day Ohio schools were cancelled, the next day bars and restaurants were ordered closed on Saturday night, and by Saturday itself the whole state was on a suggested lockdown. So things moved really fast and I was definitely not ahead of the curve.
That was only 2 weeks ago.
Me and two of my coworkers got the flu on February 14th, in fact many people in the building developed a hack over the following weeks. It was not COVID-19 as it had not appeared yet in Michigan and the doctors we saw confirmed it was just the flu. Still we were hacking for three weeks and everyone was making jokes about us having the corona virus. It’s not a joke anymore but there are still idiots out there claiming we brought the COVID-19 into the building, despite not a single person testing positive for it.
When I got the numbers of how fast the infections spread. It’s not 1.3 like the regular flu, but between 2 and 3. “Exponential.” We’ve faced deadlier respiratory diseases before, but none ever spread this quickly since the Spanish Flu (as far as I can tell).
I was concerned when I heard about it in China, although I had a combination of skepticism about any news from China/recognition that we weren’t getting the whole story, as well as a certain “faith” in their totalitarian system to effectively and completely lock down anything like this. What I didn’t anticipate was that they’d bungle it, as well as cover it up, giving the virus a few extra weeks to spread outside of China.
After that, once I started hearing about rampant cases in Italy and Iran, it was something I was taking seriously, and have since felt like everything we’ve been doing has been about 2 weeks too late and kind of wishy-washy for my comfort. I mean, we (DFW area) should have been on shelter-in-place back around March 15 or before, not just starting to enact measures to limit the spread. Same thing for everywhere else.
Aye; same. I ordered masks and gloves 26 January and started buying extra rice, beans, pasta, cleaning supplies, etc. around that same time. If necessary, I could stay in my home for at least 90 days with no problems, only venturing out for scrip refills.
About two to three weeks ago, I think.
I heard about it in late January, about Chinese New Year. Taiwan was really starting to pay attention to it then.
Schools were supposed to open a week after Chinese New Year in early February, but were postponed for two weeks. My kids were home and only the kindergarten was open at my school.
Because both my wife and I had been in Japan during SARS (but didn’t know each other then), we weren’t as concerned as others around here in Taiwan because they had lived through that. Talking to my adult students, was my Oh Shit! moment where I started to think that it could get much worse.
Fortunately, Taiwan has managed to keep things under control so far. We will see how it goes, but they have been very aggressive about tracking down people who have been in contact with anyone who had developed it.
We did pick up a bunch of surgical masks while we were in the States. That’s helped because I’m required to wear while teaching. Taiwan is rationing masks so we don’t have to wait in line.
We made it a habit of having essentials on hand and we increased them recently.
I didn’t hit panic until recently and it’s a more a worry for friends and family back home because Taiwan is still doing well in containing things.
The day China started shutting airports down I went out and bought toilet paper. that would have been late January.
Another one who was never of the “just a flu” ilk. I was somewhat aware of it during February, and I started monitoring Worldometer on March 1st. I distinctly recall noticing there were already a couple of cases reported in Iceland (for a virus that had originated only a couple months prior in China) and thinking, “Shit, that thing travels fast.”
The real turning point, however, was March 11, when the NBA shut down. That was when it really hit home that major societal disruptions were looming.