I was terminally online during that time, and some reports of a truly awful pneumonia in China were going around as early as mid-November. It was definitely known to be a major outbreak by early December. A lot of the early reports were taken down; just CCCP CCP doing CCCP CCP things.
Edit: whoops thought it had that extra C in there. Should probably use CPC anyway.
Yeah, I remember seeing TikToks about it way before December. Lots of “there are a LOT of people sick in China right now with pneumonia, and it has actually started to hurt their economy. It’ll eventually make its way over here” types of things. The warning signs were there, for those who cared to look.
I mostly saw it on the finance side of tiktok, since lots of financial analysts were like “uhh this shit could crash the economy if it spreads.”
Considering there were quarantines in December, I'm pretty sure health officials were in the know. Though official international reporting may not have happened until Dec 31.
Well yeah. If people all over the world knew weeks earlier, obviously the health officials knew. But if they didn't report it before, that doesn't disagree with the textbook.
I was living in Oklahoma and I remember some of the local media mentioning this "coronavirus" thing that was spreading in China. I also remember people joking about Corona (the beer) being suddenly less popular.
Then in February, March, and April it getting more and more serious, and this is about the time that people started claiming it wasn't real, and if it was, it wasn't that bad, and if it was, then it was from a chinese lab bent on taking down the US...
April-May had me re-adjusting my previous opinions of people around me that I thought were rational.
I was working in the hospital at the time from a big-picture perspective and it seemed pneumonia cases were already spiking in the US during December 2019. My sister and my coworker both came down with a nasty "pneumonia" during then as well.