There are 70 known cases of Coronavirus in the US. Making precautions at this point is reasonable, going to extremes is not.

My suggestion is to prepare for the possibility of major disruption starting 2 to 6 months from now. Avoid non refundable trips etc.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html There are only 70 known cases because the US has only tested 472 people. Compare this to South Korea which has tested 90k+ people or Italy which has tested 9.5k people. The virus is well spread around the world and you shouldn't base your decisions around the confirmed number of cases.

Where can I find how many people have been tested per country? This seems to be critical information yet I don't find an easy source of information.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/ This is not updated often so it's a few days behind current numbers. But basically it comes from CDC's and health ministries of other countries.

The US has had a severe shortage of tests. Scientests estimate there are probably 150 actual cases in Washington State now

We’ll know more as tests are rolled out. But there’s community spread in four states. In a couple weeks American numbers will probably look like South Korea’s now, if not higher. Two weeks about SK had 30 cases. Now almost 4,000.

I generally agree about not going to extremes, but your timeline is way too slow.

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1233970271318503426

I understand what you are saying about overreacting, but citing 70 current cases is misleading. The current thinking according to a tweet I can’t find is that there is a cluster of at least 300 in Washington.

I’m guessing if the USA was actually testing as much as they should the current count would be closer to 1,000. The fiasco with the returned cruise ship passengers alone could have dramatically spread it.

This thread: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1233970271318503426

> There are 70 known cases of Coronavirus in the US.

Sure, but “known” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, we know that there are unknown cases and we don't know how many and we know that in at least a couple of places (and it's likely that there are more we don't know about) some of known and therefore almost certainly more of the unknown cases are due to community spread.

> My suggestion is to prepare for the possibility of major disruption starting 2 to 6 months from now.

This is too optimistic. We're currently in the exponential growth phase of this outbreak. Things can change rapidly, much sooner than 2-6 months.

Self-interest aside, it's a moral imperative to do what we can to slow the spread of this outbreak. The mortality rate for COVID19 is highly correlated with overburdening of the healthcare system. I fear the US healthcare system is woefully unprepared.

It's only 70 cases because people aren't getting tested.

NY Times now reports estimates of up to 1500 undetected cases in Washington state alone (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/coronavirus-news.ht...). Though that is a a rough order-of-magnitude guesstimate based on virus analysis in Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash; however, it's reasonable to say that while there are some 70 confirmed individuals, we have evidence to say that there are much more cases in USA than that, we just haven't found them, and haven't isolated them, so they'll continue spreading the disease.

My suggestion would be to prepare for the possibility of a major disruption in 2 to 6 weeks, not 2 to 6 months, given what we've seen of how fast the number of cases have grown in other countries.

Believing 70 "known" cases in the US = 70 existing cases in the US is a fallacy.

My approach at this point is to minimize booking things that I can't cancel or that have significant cancellation penalties. It wouldn't surprise me if I end up eating some additional costs for booking things late or last minute fees for cancellations. Not that I was planning to anyway but this is certainly not the year for booking expensive pre-paid trips.

I agree with you. I'd argue that even thousands of cases in the US wouldn't put you at risk (especially if you're young and healthy). However, if we consider that the number of infected people increases tenfold every 10-15 days, and that there already many unreported sick people, we may expect disruptions sooner that 2 to 6 months.

It could have been zero cases if they didn’t start detection, and right now is very limited detection and found 70.

I feel like now is the time to take preventative measures like canceling large gatherings, crowd avoidance, etc. They’ll have more of an effect now than in two weeks.

I also don’t think this is a panicked view point.

To me, if we wait until it’s obvious we need to take steps, we’ll have wasted a lot of firepower, so to speak.