04-10-2020, 10:20 AM
For me the recognition happened in a series of up and down events:
I recognized it was a big deal medically early; I think around the New Years break in some of the medical newsletters I read a cluster of unusual pneumonias in Wuhan was being reported. When it was found to be a coronavirus, I naively assumed it would follow the same trajectory as SARS and MERS: seriously affect a few thousand people and kill around 10% but be (relatively) contained. Around this time I would have been one of the people arguing that it was likely to be not as big of a deal as the flu because despite higher mortality I didn't expect it to become a pandemic. Wuhan being shut down was the turning point for me, especially when there were news reports of millions of people leaving right before the quarantine was instituted (another failing of the CCP) and people headed home to their home provinces for Chinese New Year. At that point, I expected millions of cases in China. When these did not materialize I was somewhat reassured.
Then there were the cases in Sacramento and Washington. That there had been community spread had obvious implications, and I knew that the fire was going to be hard to put out.
I was in Honduras on a medical mission when the recognition dawned on the US and had somewhat limited internet access. That's when theer were outbreaks in Italy and Iran and the first big drops happened in the stock market happened. Then over the next two weeks everything was happening faster... my company went from "monitoring the pandemic" to encouraging people to work from home, to mandating all but business essential people work from home in the span of a week. Schools went from starting to ask whether we needed to cancel school (but concluding "no" on Wednesday) to sending kids home until the end of spring break on Friday, and the NBA went from mocking coronavirus concerns in a press conference to having people test positive and stopping the season.
BC
I recognized it was a big deal medically early; I think around the New Years break in some of the medical newsletters I read a cluster of unusual pneumonias in Wuhan was being reported. When it was found to be a coronavirus, I naively assumed it would follow the same trajectory as SARS and MERS: seriously affect a few thousand people and kill around 10% but be (relatively) contained. Around this time I would have been one of the people arguing that it was likely to be not as big of a deal as the flu because despite higher mortality I didn't expect it to become a pandemic. Wuhan being shut down was the turning point for me, especially when there were news reports of millions of people leaving right before the quarantine was instituted (another failing of the CCP) and people headed home to their home provinces for Chinese New Year. At that point, I expected millions of cases in China. When these did not materialize I was somewhat reassured.
Then there were the cases in Sacramento and Washington. That there had been community spread had obvious implications, and I knew that the fire was going to be hard to put out.
I was in Honduras on a medical mission when the recognition dawned on the US and had somewhat limited internet access. That's when theer were outbreaks in Italy and Iran and the first big drops happened in the stock market happened. Then over the next two weeks everything was happening faster... my company went from "monitoring the pandemic" to encouraging people to work from home, to mandating all but business essential people work from home in the span of a week. Schools went from starting to ask whether we needed to cancel school (but concluding "no" on Wednesday) to sending kids home until the end of spring break on Friday, and the NBA went from mocking coronavirus concerns in a press conference to having people test positive and stopping the season.
BC