I think you're definitely on the early curve. My timeline is pretty distinct in my head, because I had a family trip planned on March 15th. I remember the leadup very clearly:

March 1-2: Hey, should we be worried about this coronavirus thing? Nah, seems fine.

March 2-9: Hey, should we be...

March 9: Hey, should we actually be worried about this coronavirus thing? Ehh.. it still seems pretty low-risk.

March 10: Y'know, there's a decent number of cases in <place we were going>; maybe we should hold off just in case?

March 11: Oh, this isn't just my vacation -- my school is closing too.

March 12: Oh boy. This is gonna be a big deal.

That March 12 date sticks out for a lot of people I know. Even as someone who was tracking coronavirus as early as January, I just didn't think it would be that big of a deal until March 12.

I just checked my records for when I last flew, because I remember that every single person in the airport (myself included) were wearing face masks, and there was a genuine feeling of concern about the situation. It was February 4.

This was in Thailand, which was the first country outside of China to have a confirmed case (on 13 Jan). By and large people here were taking it quite seriously at the time (and continue to do so); nobody waited for the government or health authorities to tell them to wear masks, they just did it. It was clear to me back then it was going to spread to the west pretty quickly and be a massive problem if countries didn't lock down and lock down fast.

According to the Johns Hopkins dashboard, Thailand has had 3,691 cases and 59 deaths out of a population of ~70 million. At one point we reached 100 days with zero local transmission. Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind.

> Thailand

> Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind

Sounds like freedom is incompatible with your mind.

Do you think posting like this is an effective tactic? I'm surprised it hasn't been flagged, and considering how poorly if reflects upon you I think it would be better for you if it were.

I too started preparing for the inevitable in late February, and already felt like I was behind. If you look at when various states first issued stay-at-home orders though, California's March 19 action marks the early point at which COVID was "a thing" among the broader population.[0] It was possible for individuals to be very ahead of the curve of this one, due to the slow reaction time by officials.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_governmen...

Why are you using the 19MAR stay-at-home order as the threshold rather than the 04MAR emergency declaration?

Also, various corporations were already enacting travel-related policies for their employees in mid/late February.

The stay-at-home orders more closely captured when I saw people's behaviour radically change, instead of the state of emergency declarations.

If you're curious for a more objective measure of when mass behaviour started to change, you can look at data like Opentable's seated dining reservations[0] or mobile-device travel data[1].

[0] https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...

I know that our media talked about a spread event in Italy on February 21, and after that confirmed to be spread to our country shortly after (people that had returned from their ski holiday). Then at Feb 25 we had Carnaval, which was very quickly confirmed to be a super spread event, and I vividly remember every already talking how irresponsible that was.

At least in Europe, COVID was definitely “a thing” by end of February. We went into full lockdown in The Netherlands at March 12, and we were relatively late.

You're not the only one with that impression, but I think they are talking about mainstream media when they say that it was mostly ignored in early March.

The internet weirdos I followed were all tweeting about it in mid-January, so by the time it was February I was checking Twitter every night for an update, and having a laugh at the totally brainless exhortations by the mainstream media that anybody that believed in Coronavirus was a right-wing conspiracy nut. (By mid-March this had flipped.)