If you’re in a major city, this is the time to start taking preventative measures. Avoid mass gatherings and public transport if you can.
My suggestion is to prepare for the possibility of major disruption starting 2 to 6 months from now. Avoid non refundable trips etc.
I’m guessing if the USA was actually testing as much as they should the current count would be closer to 1,000. The fiasco with the returned cruise ship passengers alone could have dramatically spread it.
We’ll know more as tests are rolled out. But there’s community spread in four states. In a couple weeks American numbers will probably look like South Korea’s now, if not higher. Two weeks about SK had 30 cases. Now almost 4,000.
I generally agree about not going to extremes, but your timeline is way too slow.
Sure, but “known” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, we know that there are unknown cases and we don't know how many and we know that in at least a couple of places (and it's likely that there are more we don't know about) some of known and therefore almost certainly more of the unknown cases are due to community spread.
This is too optimistic. We're currently in the exponential growth phase of this outbreak. Things can change rapidly, much sooner than 2-6 months.
Self-interest aside, it's a moral imperative to do what we can to slow the spread of this outbreak. The mortality rate for COVID19 is highly correlated with overburdening of the healthcare system. I fear the US healthcare system is woefully unprepared.
My suggestion would be to prepare for the possibility of a major disruption in 2 to 6 weeks, not 2 to 6 months, given what we've seen of how fast the number of cases have grown in other countries.
I also don’t think this is a panicked view point.
To me, if we wait until it’s obvious we need to take steps, we’ll have wasted a lot of firepower, so to speak.