I’m seeing more and more that COVID wasn’t “a thing” until mid-march, and it clashes with my impressions.
I have a clear date for when it was “becoming serious” for me, because I pretty much sold my entire stocks portfolio, 24th of Feb, which is almost a month before.
Am I the only one with that impression?
March 1-2: Hey, should we be worried about this coronavirus thing? Nah, seems fine.
March 2-9: Hey, should we be...
March 9: Hey, should we actually be worried about this coronavirus thing? Ehh.. it still seems pretty low-risk.
March 10: Y'know, there's a decent number of cases in <place we were going>; maybe we should hold off just in case?
March 11: Oh, this isn't just my vacation -- my school is closing too.
March 12: Oh boy. This is gonna be a big deal.
That March 12 date sticks out for a lot of people I know. Even as someone who was tracking coronavirus as early as January, I just didn't think it would be that big of a deal until March 12.
This was in Thailand, which was the first country outside of China to have a confirmed case (on 13 Jan). By and large people here were taking it quite seriously at the time (and continue to do so); nobody waited for the government or health authorities to tell them to wear masks, they just did it. It was clear to me back then it was going to spread to the west pretty quickly and be a massive problem if countries didn't lock down and lock down fast.
According to the Johns Hopkins dashboard, Thailand has had 3,691 cases and 59 deaths out of a population of ~70 million. At one point we reached 100 days with zero local transmission. Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind.
> Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind
Sounds like freedom is incompatible with your mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_governmen...
Also, various corporations were already enacting travel-related policies for their employees in mid/late February.
If you're curious for a more objective measure of when mass behaviour started to change, you can look at data like Opentable's seated dining reservations[0] or mobile-device travel data[1].
[0] https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...
At least in Europe, COVID was definitely “a thing” by end of February. We went into full lockdown in The Netherlands at March 12, and we were relatively late.
The internet weirdos I followed were all tweeting about it in mid-January, so by the time it was February I was checking Twitter every night for an update, and having a laugh at the totally brainless exhortations by the mainstream media that anybody that believed in Coronavirus was a right-wing conspiracy nut. (By mid-March this had flipped.)