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This is chilling to read. Here's one email going around top government officials in January. It would be more than a month before any schools closed, and before healthcare workers were able to sound the alarm about the lack of masks and respirators.
Eva Lee brought the knowledge, but again, it would be a month from this Red Dawn missive to general awareness of the deep sh*t we were in, social distancing recs, & any scrambling to bolster supply chain. Feb may go down as the most tragic month of lost opportunity in US history
"Who could have known?" the President said, last week. These people knew. They knew how time was slipping away, how important social distancing was, how inadequate testing was.
The Red Dawn players are listed at the top of this document: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6879-2020-covid-19-red-dawn-rising/66f590d5cd41e11bea0f/optimized/full.pdf#page=1
OMG. Second week in February and some officials were still hemming and hawing over the extent of human-to-human transition. One public health official "thinks flu is what we have to fight, not COVID-19." Influenza was already in sharp decline in mid Feb.
Carter Mecher pushing hard for "NPIs" (non pharmaceutical interventions) - these are community measures to halt spread of infectious disease - on Feb 17th. The first state-wide stay at home order (Gov Newsom, California) is still more than a month away.
By Feb 18th, at least, the Red Dawn group realized fully what lack of containment measures meant for the healthcare system. The now-famous "flatten the curve" graphic would not make an appearance on the scene until March 8th ( https://www.fastcompany.com/90476143/the-story-behind-flatten-the-curve-the-defining-chart-of-the-coronavirus)
