As someone who has been following this closely right from the start (my work colleagues could testify to my scaremongering since mid January) I will throw in my 2c worth.
China lied in the early stages about what was going on. Lies were exposed and obvious to anyone taking notice, by mid-January.
W.H.O. were too politically correct in some of their statements for the second half of January, but the detail of the message was pretty clear. They warned what was coming about EVERYTHING, apart from the toilet paper fetish.
USA, Australia and others shutting their borders to travellers to China on 1 Feb was an intelligent move, and one that the politically correct progressives would have struggled with, but possibly a few days overdue, given the information available at the time.
For what it is worth, I give credit to Trump for giving the okay to that decision, at the time.
Perhaps this is not quite politically correct to say, but figures for both USA and China (and for a number of other countries) are dubious, at the moment.
This will probably draw a lot of criticism to say this, but since that one good decision by Trump, the USA response appears to have been utterly shambolic. How can you fight a disease if you don’t test who has it? Why give mixed and contradictory messages? That only stops people taking it seriously. Why say it will fade by summer (without any evidence that that may be the case)? Why tell people they might be back in churches by Easter when any statistician looking at the data could see that that was delusional. Why make it all so political, so only 41% of Republicans (compared to 71% of Democrats) think they are at risk? Just a crazy mess, in my view. And it gets worse, NY Gov Cuomo (a Democrat) thinks they are near or on an “apex”. The data doesn’t seem to suggest that at all. On current trends, I would predict USA will be approaching 1 million cases within about a fortnight, but I would be happy ( even ecstatic) to be wrong.
