Quote:
Originally Posted by oil pan 4
The difference is this time people had enough money to buy all the food in the store.
China knew about this in the middle of November.
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No they didn't, the November 17th was retroactively estimated through testing done later.
https://www.livescience.com/first-ca...rus-found.html
Doctors first suspected a new disease late December. It takes more than one case of pneumonia to suspect a new bug is going around.
It's very important people remember the timeline correctly to judge their own government's response and how it should have been different if at all for future improvement. December 31st is when the WHO was notified about a new virus, January 7th is when the genome was sequenced, and lab proof of human to human transmission was January 20th. Those are the dates from which response time should be measured.
From what I've read, January 7th should've been the moment where everyone around the world should've gotten at least some test kits and protective gear production ready (highly probable that the virus is infectious), and somewhere before the 20th, someone should have looked at the ramp up in pneumonia cases and decided all large scale gatherings in Wuhan should've been cancelled. Losing 1 week like that translated into about 5x the cases.
Border closure to China on Feb 1st should've also come with mandatory fever screening for all arrivals from anywhere, regardless of residency/citizenship status. At the time, it was unknown that asymptomatic carriers were so widespread, but symptomatic carriers were allowed to walk in.
The moment community transmission was detected in Italy and the US, that should've been the signal to quarantine every single arrival from outside and lock down every big city, given Wuhan hospitals were already overrun and deaths skyrocketing. Italy's early cases were imported from Germany, not China. A lot of visitors to Italy imported the virus into the US.
And unfortunately it is absolutely necessary that the government proactively and forcefully takes these measures. Word about a new disease was spreading on the internet since the last week of December, yet here we are in late March and there are still idiots running around crowded public places. The longer there are any people in non-compliance with quarantine measures, the longer the economic pain lasts.
Applying 20/20 hindsight the way you did doesn't make the future response better.