> it didn't "feel real" in the beginning
Plus, a lot of the interventions don't really make much sense if you're the only one doing them.
For example, imagine I'm not worried about my own safety, but I am for the safety of others. Staying home and self-isolating will help with this if almost everyone else does it - but if I start a month early, doing it on my own? Negligible benefit.
And of course, much easier to get to work from home at an otherwise-non-WFH company once your boss and their boss are thinking the same way as you, and they've heard Google and Apple are doing the same...
Or they work with remote teams around the world, including China & Europe, and saw first-hand what was coming.
Every major bank in NYC has trading desks across the world, including Asian markets. Shouldn't they have seen it coming as well?
This. It seems most people are incapable of making decisions purely based on what their mind or the math says. I kind of get it, it didn't "feel real" in the beginning, it was just the mind that went "omg we need to act NOW", not the stomach. I suspect this is why the Silicon Valley Crowd was so far ahead of the curve - they deal with exponential growth more often, and are used to listen to just their brains, for better or worse.