> A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode (...)

Your circles seem to be the exception then. There are a lot of factors that affect personal perception of such matters, like proximity to inflicted areas, professional background (ex: medical), experiencing similar events in the past, etc.

In hindsight it seems obvious that the world wasn't paying attention. But it took until February for western countries to realize the epidemic was already out of control, and the markets reacted.

> prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse

Anyone that knew this last month without a doubt could've made tons of money shorting positions in the stock market.

If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.

There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.

My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.

My "circles" (which include a friend married to a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who had been in Wuhan last October) knew that COVID-19 was possibly a serious concern, but also "knew" that it could have wound up as another SARS (not that SARS wasn't terrible, but it was also very localized in terms of overall impact).

I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.

>Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy.

Big same. I'm just another software engineer, albeit one with a taste for international news and a few China-focused specialists & one or two PRCs citizens that I follow on Twitter.

This was predictable in early-mid Jan. Once the pics and discussion of the overloaded Wuhan hospitals and the measures the PRC had to take hit the English language world, it was pretty bloody obvious. The news had hit the popular English language papers by Jan 27[1], although I was reading about it somewhat earlier - Jan 12 at the latest[2]. A timeline can be found in [3]. Anyway, by Feb 1, institutions with a specialty in disease control should have been going full bore to address the incoming wave.

Our public health officials, the officials they advise, and other health institutions should be held up to scrutiny and not covered with glory dust just because they had to act by the pace of events.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-... [3] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...

Maybe you should have told every single government in the world, because none predicted that it would have this huge of an impact. SARS1 pretty much stayed in China, MERS pretty much stayed in the Middle East. It was only when a country like Italy was caught by surprise that governments started to consider very far reaching measures.

Depending on the country and an observer’s cynicism, I think the majority of nations understood early on that it was already far too late to significantly dampen the impact of such a deadly and infectious virus.

The United States government was thoroughly informed of this risk via Operation Dark Winter but never geared up for it - perhaps this is best managed by states once the infection crosses the border, but preparations on those levels weren’t completed either.

It’s not possible to predict the future, so I disagree with your stance that it was obvious a virus could cause an economic downturn like this. It comes across as victim blaming to me.