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I was the first in our office to go permanently WFH in February of 2020, three weeks before our offices closed, because I recognized that SARS-Cov-2 would be a

I was the first in our office to go permanently WFH in February of 2020, three weeks before our offices closed, because I recognized that SARS-Cov-2 would be a huge problem, when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode. Here's the news that did not pass my bullshit detector: 1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast it spread. It didn't make sense to me that a virus that is dragged onto the ground by water droplets would spread with such speed. 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. The only bullshit I wasn't able to capitalize on was SPX crashing. I calculated that it should have fallen to less than $1000/share (closer to $500), based on past panic sell patterns, which was obviously not a guarantee, but the government stepped in and I missed out on quite a bit of money. I still think bailing out rich people's money in the stock market was complete bullshit on behalf of the government (but what do I know?). I know it's all in retrospect now, so it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, but at the time, it wasn't easy to be the guy who said "see ya guys, I'm going to hide from a virus that's going to turn into a global pandemic and you should all be doing the same because it's the logical thing to do based on the known facts". Even my manager (who approved my request to WFH) looked at me like I'm the token crazy guy from sci-fi movies holding "the end is nigh" sign. I wish more people thought critically and had healthy skepticism towards all the information they receive, not just the part they disagree with. I was never a fan of blindly trusting anything. I trust, but I verify.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold. In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Many of us knew in January when the Chinese doctor spilled the news before he was in-prisoned.
  - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    imprisoned*
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Feb 2020 is the timeframe mentioned by the above comment. In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission. Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
    - winrid 5y ago
      There is also much propaganda still coming out of China that the virus started elsewhere. Which may be true, we'll probably never know for sure.
      - unityByFreedom 5y ago
        China has not permitted any investigation into the origins of the virus. And given the ease with which it spreads, and the fact that everyone was heads up about it in January, you'd think we'd have heard about a proliferation of cases elsewhere if it had begun elsewhere. That didn't happen. What we saw was a spread of cases in Wuhan, then in nearby China, then major cities worldwide. And as soon as it spread worldwide, China reported exactly 50% more deaths in one day [1], then stopped reporting deaths altogether. [2] [3] [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revises-coronavirus-death-toll-up-by-50-percent https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise... [2] https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png [3] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china
jeffbee 5y ago
Puts against the spx e-mini march 2020 futures went from pennies to very much in the money in the space of a few days. With puts anywhere near the money - somewhere between 2500 and 3000 - you could have made pretty much arbitrarily large profits.
nradov 5y ago
And yet for the vast majority of people it really was just a bad cold. I had a bunch of friends and family who got infected before vaccines were available, and that's literally how most of them described the experience.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  95% of people infected with polio didn't even know they had it, but we eradicated that disease anyway.
  - nradov 5y ago
    What's your point? There's no way to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because there are multiple animal reservoirs and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      My point is the fact that the majority of infected individuals didn't suffer from it does not mean it is not a serious disease. Hardly anyone was paralyzed by polio, but we view it as an extremely serious disease.
      - nradov 5y ago
        We never locked down society for 2 years because of polio.
        magicalist 5y ago
        We certainly didn't lock down society for two years because of covid.
        lemmsjid 5y ago
        According to Wikipedia on the initial polio pandemic: “On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[16] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.[17] Dr. Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic and thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts; movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings were almost nonexistent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, and told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches.” Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-fall-2020/then-and-now-polio-and-covid-19 https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...
onethought 5y ago
I'm going to assume you're in the US? Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
- tomp 5y ago
  Which countries exactly? EU kept it’s head firmly in the sand until Bergamo happened towards the end of February, and even then the prevailing philosophy was “Italians are idiots, this can’t happen to us”.
  - onethought 5y ago
    Well, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, of course China had Wuhan in full lockdown. By March Canada, a handful of the south americas, uk had all started some form of restrictions.
  - makomk 5y ago
    Yeah, whereas the reality seems to be more like Italians were idiots, and this could well be why it happened to us. There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives. The information coming out of Italy was obviously garbage. The only way for an outbreak to go from first detected community spread to hospital systems collapsing so fast was if they'd done an even worse job of testing patients with no ties to China who were hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than the US, which had a policy of not testing patients with no ties to China hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms (and still detected them much earlier in the outbreak). Obviously you weren't going to get any meaningful figures on infection rates out of that - was it a mild disease causing lots of deaths by infecting everyone, or something slower spreading but deadlier? Who knows. Their treatment guidance was bad and likely killed people too. And it's worth remembering that pretty much no other country had cases seeded from China turn into uncontrolled community spread in the way Italy did, before or after them, except perhaps South Korea - the whole rest of the pandemic seems to trace back to Italy's massive undetected and uncontrolled community outbreak. It was obvious that something different had happened in Italy, and there wasn't enough evidence to say exactly what or what the implications would be for the rest of the world.
pasabagi 5y ago
I think anybody with a feeling to go with the words 'exponential growth' could tell that this virus was going to be a huge problem from very early on. That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.
- prox 5y ago
  Yeah, that was my thinking as well. China was late to react (like ages) and then you could see that China could not contain it. If China can’t, few others who can. What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
- bertjk 5y ago
  Every infectious disease spreads exponentially, but not all of them turn into pandemics.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    I guess, but there were loads of things about this disease that made it stand out right from the start. The bad timing (before chinese new year), low lethality, high transmission rates, high asymptomatic rates, all made it pretty clear even to non-experts that this was going to be a really big deal. Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Except they don’t spread exponentially like some startup hockey stick growth chart. They might start exponentially but eventually it gets harder and harder to find the next host to the spread peaks and eventually declines. The chart of a virus spread is not really exponential at all. Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
philliphaydon 5y ago
We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019, at the end of Jan I flew to the UK and at the airport literally every single Asian person wore a mask, and myself. I didn't see any non-asian person wearing a mask. Wore mask the whole flight, on the way home I had 2 elderly people on the plane tell me I was scaring them for wearing a mask. I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH. I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019 That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1] > At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone. > His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia. https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid19/ https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...
  - scruffyherder 5y ago
    Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas. It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      > Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas. I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated. Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back. > It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media. Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
laurent92 5y ago
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020. It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.” > I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health. I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science. They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis. Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.
zhdc1 5y ago
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become. So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers. The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out. What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.
- winrid 5y ago
  It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)
  - sampo 5y ago
    > to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficiency-as-a-function-of-particle-size-modified-from-Zevenhoven-and_fig8_266099381 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
    - tzs 5y ago
      Here's a short explanation of how some of the mechanisms mention in that diagram work [1]. [1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documents/pdfs/042665.pdf https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
kurupt213 5y ago
Everyone knew since the original sars outbreak that the only protection was a respirator. The N95 is the lowest level that provides meaningful protection.
- andybak 5y ago
  Are there any good sources of evidence for that? I'd also like to understand how you are defining "meaningful" and whether you are considering reduced viral load.
divbzero 5y ago
In addition to your hunch “wow this spreads fast”, there was also highly suggestive evidence that came out bit by bit. The one that sticks in my head was the news report of the virus spreading at a choir rehearsal in March of 2020: Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead. The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back. Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Previously, in February 2020, when the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined in Japan with passengers locked down in their cabins and COVID continued to spread between the cabins, that was my "this is an airborne virus" moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
  - deleted 5y ago
mach1ne 5y ago
I know what you mean. For me, it was the facts that the incubation period was 10 days and the virus was asymptomatic yet infectious during that time. Of course, now we have learned that it's infectious only about the last two days.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CTDOCodebases 5y ago
All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too. Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  That turns out to be a fairly small number of people. The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny. Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes. In fact we're still there even after millions of dead. The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months. But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
  - CTDOCodebases 5y ago
    Good points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.
    - usrusr 5y ago
      Guilty of that. While I do remember being concerned about the virus becoming worldwide, I was more concerned about electronics supply chains collapsing at the source. It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
- 5y ago
justin66 5y ago
> CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. I would wager that is something no one from the CDC ever said, wrote, or implied. They told people they would not benefit from using N95 masks, which was damaging enough.
muh_gradle 5y ago
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

> when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold. In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.

ipaddr 5y ago
Many of us knew in January when the Chinese doctor spilled the news before he was in-prisoned.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  imprisoned*
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Feb 2020 is the timeframe mentioned by the above comment. In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission. Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
  - winrid 5y ago
    There is also much propaganda still coming out of China that the virus started elsewhere. Which may be true, we'll probably never know for sure.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      China has not permitted any investigation into the origins of the virus. And given the ease with which it spreads, and the fact that everyone was heads up about it in January, you'd think we'd have heard about a proliferation of cases elsewhere if it had begun elsewhere. That didn't happen. What we saw was a spread of cases in Wuhan, then in nearby China, then major cities worldwide. And as soon as it spread worldwide, China reported exactly 50% more deaths in one day [1], then stopped reporting deaths altogether. [2] [3] [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revises-coronavirus-death-toll-up-by-50-percent https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise... [2] https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png [3] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china

jeffbee 5y ago

Puts against the spx e-mini march 2020 futures went from pennies to very much in the money in the space of a few days. With puts anywhere near the money - somewhere between 2500 and 3000 - you could have made pretty much arbitrarily large profits.

nradov 5y ago

And yet for the vast majority of people it really was just a bad cold. I had a bunch of friends and family who got infected before vaccines were available, and that's literally how most of them described the experience.

jeffbee 5y ago
95% of people infected with polio didn't even know they had it, but we eradicated that disease anyway.
- nradov 5y ago
  What's your point? There's no way to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because there are multiple animal reservoirs and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    My point is the fact that the majority of infected individuals didn't suffer from it does not mean it is not a serious disease. Hardly anyone was paralyzed by polio, but we view it as an extremely serious disease.
    - nradov 5y ago
      We never locked down society for 2 years because of polio.
      - magicalist 5y ago
        We certainly didn't lock down society for two years because of covid.
      - lemmsjid 5y ago
        According to Wikipedia on the initial polio pandemic: “On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[16] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.[17] Dr. Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic and thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts; movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings were almost nonexistent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, and told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches.” Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-fall-2020/then-and-now-polio-and-covid-19 https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...

onethought 5y ago

I'm going to assume you're in the US? Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.

tomp 5y ago
Which countries exactly? EU kept it’s head firmly in the sand until Bergamo happened towards the end of February, and even then the prevailing philosophy was “Italians are idiots, this can’t happen to us”.
- onethought 5y ago
  Well, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, of course China had Wuhan in full lockdown. By March Canada, a handful of the south americas, uk had all started some form of restrictions.
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, whereas the reality seems to be more like Italians were idiots, and this could well be why it happened to us. There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives. The information coming out of Italy was obviously garbage. The only way for an outbreak to go from first detected community spread to hospital systems collapsing so fast was if they'd done an even worse job of testing patients with no ties to China who were hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than the US, which had a policy of not testing patients with no ties to China hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms (and still detected them much earlier in the outbreak). Obviously you weren't going to get any meaningful figures on infection rates out of that - was it a mild disease causing lots of deaths by infecting everyone, or something slower spreading but deadlier? Who knows. Their treatment guidance was bad and likely killed people too. And it's worth remembering that pretty much no other country had cases seeded from China turn into uncontrolled community spread in the way Italy did, before or after them, except perhaps South Korea - the whole rest of the pandemic seems to trace back to Italy's massive undetected and uncontrolled community outbreak. It was obvious that something different had happened in Italy, and there wasn't enough evidence to say exactly what or what the implications would be for the rest of the world.

pasabagi 5y ago

I think anybody with a feeling to go with the words 'exponential growth' could tell that this virus was going to be a huge problem from very early on. That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.

prox 5y ago
Yeah, that was my thinking as well. China was late to react (like ages) and then you could see that China could not contain it. If China can’t, few others who can. What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
bertjk 5y ago
Every infectious disease spreads exponentially, but not all of them turn into pandemics.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  I guess, but there were loads of things about this disease that made it stand out right from the start. The bad timing (before chinese new year), low lethality, high transmission rates, high asymptomatic rates, all made it pretty clear even to non-experts that this was going to be a really big deal. Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
spookthesunset 5y ago
Except they don’t spread exponentially like some startup hockey stick growth chart. They might start exponentially but eventually it gets harder and harder to find the next host to the spread peaks and eventually declines. The chart of a virus spread is not really exponential at all. Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
- pasabagi 5y ago

philliphaydon 5y ago

We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019, at the end of Jan I flew to the UK and at the airport literally every single Asian person wore a mask, and myself. I didn't see any non-asian person wearing a mask. Wore mask the whole flight, on the way home I had 2 elderly people on the plane tell me I was scaring them for wearing a mask. I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH. I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019 That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1] > At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone. > His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia. https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid19/ https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas. It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    > Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas. I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated. Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back. > It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media. Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...

laurent92 5y ago

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020. It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.” > I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health. I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.

mschuster91 5y ago
> I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science. They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis. Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.

zhdc1 5y ago

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become. So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers. The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out. What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.

winrid 5y ago
It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)
- sampo 5y ago
  > to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficiency-as-a-function-of-particle-size-modified-from-Zevenhoven-and_fig8_266099381 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
  - tzs 5y ago
    Here's a short explanation of how some of the mechanisms mention in that diagram work [1]. [1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documents/pdfs/042665.pdf https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...

kurupt213 5y ago

Everyone knew since the original sars outbreak that the only protection was a respirator. The N95 is the lowest level that provides meaningful protection.

andybak 5y ago
Are there any good sources of evidence for that? I'd also like to understand how you are defining "meaningful" and whether you are considering reduced viral load.

divbzero 5y ago

In addition to your hunch “wow this spreads fast”, there was also highly suggestive evidence that came out bit by bit. The one that sticks in my head was the news report of the virus spreading at a choir rehearsal in March of 2020: Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead. The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back. Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...

GeekyBear 5y ago
Previously, in February 2020, when the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined in Japan with passengers locked down in their cabins and COVID continued to spread between the cabins, that was my "this is an airborne virus" moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
- deleted 5y ago

mach1ne 5y ago

I know what you mean. For me, it was the facts that the incubation period was 10 days and the virus was asymptomatic yet infectious during that time. Of course, now we have learned that it's infectious only about the last two days.

deleted 5y ago

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CTDOCodebases 5y ago

All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too. Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
That turns out to be a fairly small number of people. The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny. Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes. In fact we're still there even after millions of dead. The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months. But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
- CTDOCodebases 5y ago
  Good points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Guilty of that. While I do remember being concerned about the virus becoming worldwide, I was more concerned about electronics supply chains collapsing at the source. It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
5y ago

justin66 5y ago

> CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. I would wager that is something no one from the CDC ever said, wrote, or implied. They told people they would not benefit from using N95 masks, which was damaging enough.

muh_gradle 5y ago

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them. People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.