@milee30
I misspoke, my apologies. I didn’t mean to say our friend knew a pandemic was coming but that he felt the virus, which appeared to him to be very dangerous and deadly, would come to the USA. My family who he warned has people who have some pretty serious health issues and thus the warning.
He is not working for the CDC or some other organization for which he could speak back in December or even January and warn people of things. And he didn’t think a big warning was needed at that time since he expected we would implement standard responses (which did not get implemented to his surprise). However, he did extensive work trying to improve China’s chances to contain the virus at risk to his own life, going to China twice in December.
This person isn’t my son, just by the way. My son is in high school.
I had the virus on my radar in December and by early January was very concerned. I expected it would be contained but the things that would have contained it or at least greatly slowed it were not implemented and by the middle to 3rd week of January I was very worried and started buying masks. I tried to talk to some people about it but everyone shut me down as crazy so what was I (not a doctor) supposed to do? It was hard to get my family to take it seriously and to prepare. I don’t think I had power to do much more than that. I did post in the big thread what I thought and I do not feel that my posts had any influence on what other people thought. Those who thought it was not a big deal didn’t seem to change their thinking as a result of anything I said. People changed their thinking when schools closed down and the government (local and national) made various decisions.
I read news of the virus daily from late December and there were many warnings by various infectious disease and pandemic specialists from January, and continuing in February and March. I don’t know how anyone reading the news daily was not aware well in advance that the situation was not good and that testing hadn’t gotten going and so we could not tell if there was spread or not in January and February (but how could there not be?)
I just had to see all that China did to lock down Wuhan and how the cases kept rising and rising in spite of a much more stringent lockdown than maybe any other country took to see this was a very hard to control virus that was very scary. If that didn’t control things, having things open like other countries did for much longer than China had let things go would likely lead to huge numbers of cases, which turned out what ended up happening.
The WHO was posting daily about the situation and while they didn’t call it a pandemic until mid-February, they were telling the world very regularly that ‘the window of opportunity to control the virus is quickly closing’ and urging countries to get testing going, quarantine, contact tracing, border screening and all the things that could slow and control the spread. I read their site very frequently, often daily, starting in early January. They appeared to have to try to balance China’s need to ‘save face’ in order to have access with alerting the world, but they certainly were ringing the alarm bells from very early in this.
I don’t know the reasoning behind the WHO’s advice on border closings or restricting travel and would like to better understand the thinking behind it.
The friend who warned my brother and his family (who actually didn’t tell me until much later and well after I had been scared enough to start preparing on my own) is a good guy who did a lot of hard work to try to help make things better. He was completely frustrated by the way China handled things. Regarding how the rest of the world handled things he said, “we are (bad word).”