Excellent question, and one which has gone through my head a few times since the start of all the hoo-hah. Late 2019 practically no one - including myself - ha

Excellent question, and one which has gone through my head a few times since the start of all the hoo-hah. Late 2019 practically no one - including myself - had heard of the thing. There were of course no covid tests at the time, so all we have to go on are symptoms. The symptoms we had - they weren't exactly flu symptoms, they weren't symptoms exactly matching the common cold. With a common cold, you get a runny nose and a sore throat amongst other symptoms. I don't remember ever having a high fever with a common cold. Influenza, you'll get a fever, coughing and sneezing, and you're in for a bad time for more than 3 days. Last flu I had, the symptoms lasted for a week at least, with a recovery time measuring a couple of weeks after. We each in turn were waylaid in bed for about 3 days, with a persistent cough, a fever, and generally feeling pretty rotten. No runny nose or persistent sneezing. This was no bad cold nor was it influenza - I've had flu before and know what flu feels like. Similarly with a bad cold. It's why I described it as a "weird flu" in an email to customers at the time - we never encountered such an odd illness like that before. The Covid-19 pandemic did not just suddenly begin early 2020 as if it just suddenly appeared. It was with us for a while before that, in 2019, and in many countries. Patient Zero will get it and it'll spread exponentially - it only takes 1 person who unwittingly caught it, they fly to another country, someone else there unwittingly gets it, they travel somewhere else, and so on and so forth. It takes time for the various health organisations around the world to begin noticing, start talking to each other, and make recommendations to their governments. By the time governments got to the "we must do something" point, that was early 2020.