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?
