From TPM Reader AL …
My dad turned 80 on March 8th. I was already concerned about the coronavirus’s inevitable arrival, in no small part due to your excellent coverage, and it was in the back of my mind that he should cancel or postpone his birthday party and, if it wasn’t such a milestone, I might have pushed harder for it. But I didn’t, and I attended his party. Most of his friends were north of 70 and many of them weren’t taking the threat seriously (some of them wouldn’t for weeks after and at least one still doesn’t).
From TPM Reader Anon …
I would say my COVID-19 turning point was January 25, 2020. I had also been following what was going on in Wuhan, but then saw a post at dKos by a member who goes by the name of AKALib. The post was titled “Wuhan Coronavirus – An Update, Prognosis and Projections”. It listed 18 countries that the virus was in, including 5 cases in the U.S. The post included clear graphs showing exponential growth of cases, and statements by virologists:
From TPM Reader BW …
My turning point moment was in the first few days of March, when I happened upon this Feb. 29 Twitter thread from Trevor Bedford in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus had been spreading undetected in Washington state for six weeks.
TPM Reader BR’s turning points on the COVID19 Crisis while traveling abroad …
We left the US on 29 January for a 9 week stay in Ireland (through 5 April), to have been followed by 20 days in Portugal and Spain. Trip started off well enough when we realized that the legendary John Prine was on the same flight, and he was gracious enough to give us 20 minutes of his time chatting about all the places in Ireland he thought we should visit while we waited to board.
I have been fascinated by your accounts of your own turning points in the onrush of the COVID19 Crisis. They fascinate me both as a lapsed historian and also because they refresh my memory of an abrupt historical transition that is still less than two months old. Back in early March again and again we were hearing that the key signal of transition and the onset of a crisis footing was the closure of schools. Most people are only casual consumers of news. It is difficult for even important news to break through the routines of daily life. The closure of schools directly impacts almost every aspect of social life. It upends the life of kids. It upends the life of parents of school age kids. It upends all commercial and organizational life because vast numbers of workers have school age kids. Precisely because of these dislocations the decision to close schools unmistakably signals crisis. Again and again readers reported from around the country that it was in response to a school closure that the whole tenor of life in their community changed.
What was your COVID19 Crisis turning point?
For me it was February 25th when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a CDC conference call: “We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this could be bad.” It is not in my experience that public health officials make open-ended “bad” comments like that.
She went on to say: “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
This wasn’t out of the blue for me. I’d been watching the ‘novel coronavirus’ developments closely since January. I just looked at back at my Amazon purchases and it was on February 2nd that I put in an order for a stock of hand sanitizer and cloth masks. But until Messonnier’s comments I had first assumed and then hoped I was making contingency plans for edge case bad scenarios. That made clear these were likely scenarios.
Equally ominous, the comments seemed aimed not only to alert the public but to alert the public precisely because the administration was refusing to do so, either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell citizens what was happening.
What was your turning point moment?
Don’t miss this piece on a surge in cardiac episodes tied to COVID19 and how cardiologists have been forced to adapt.
International Workers’ Day, or May Day, comes on the heels of one of the worst periods for workers in quite some time. In the last six weeks, more than 30 million Americans filed for unemployment. At the same time, the S&P 500 gained more than 12 percent and recorded its best month since 1987.
How deadly is COVID19? The question has mobilized countless researchers, become a political football around the globe and probably occurred to and triggered fear in the minds of most members of the human species. The question can be posed in various ways. But the closest to what people likely mean by it is what epidemiologists call an ‘IFR’, an infection mortality rate. That is to say, the percentage of people who will die from COVID19 after being infected by it. That’s different from the number of ‘cases’ since some infections never show symptoms and many never get recorded in any medical or governmental dataset.
The epidemic in New York City allows us to make initial calculations which, though imperfect, move us toward a real estimate as opposed to inferences, history and guesswork. For each variable in the formula we have an actual number based in science and quality record keeping, even if each is subject to substantial uncertainty and revision.
After her predecessor rounded out her tenure as White House press secretary without holding a single press briefing, Kayleigh McEnany will hold one of those now-rare Q&A’s with reporters from the White House podium today. Read More