How do we know when covid-19 entered the US? How do we know the R0? R0 is continually being estimated upward and death rate downward. We don't seem to have much clarity on any of this.

Another problem is if covid-19 was already widespread, it would have been misclassified before the huge spotlight. So, increase in cases and deaths could be misattributed.

If there is an overall increase in excess deaths, we still have a question of causality. Could the measures we are instituting themselves contribute to deaths? Just a lot of questions and lack of clarity in this matter.

Staying at home in NYC causes bilateral ground glass infiltrates and causes morgues to overflow?

Sequencing produces phylogenetic trees and the mutation rate lets the nodes be dated. This is how the Seattle cluster was found.

In terms of tracking all the chains, because of the dearth of testing in the beginning, I would suspect any shorter chains of transmission that didn't end in a super-spreader could easily be missed.

It is hard to get tested even now. It was essentially a catch-22. You could only become tested if you had contact with a proven case. But there were almost no proven cases, because you can only become a proven case if you had contact with a proven case.

I don't know what the glass infiltrate is, but morgues overflowing could be a symptom of the government shutdown. For example, in Ecuador, there are bodies just lying on the street because the shutdown and general alarm about the virus means there are less people removing the deceased. The deceased are themselves not necessarily dead from covid-19 (although the news article headlines are worded ambiguously in that regard...).

In general, I see a lot of confusion and lack of clarity, along with cherry picking stats and stories to support a catastrophe narrative.