I am an Eagle Scout, and the Scout motto is "Be Prepared". I try and make sure I've got supplies to last me at least a couple of weeks if things get crazy, and plans for what to do when my home becomes unlivable. When the winter storm hit and knocked out power in my area, we were ready while many people I knew were scrambling to find food and shelter. I guess growing up in hurricane territory also instills the idea that things can go bad for a while and you need to do what you can to be ready.

It always surprises friends of mine to see that the bottom shelf of my pantry contains a lot of shelf stable meals that only slowly get cycled through. They never understood why I'd bother keeping at least several days worth of food around, "just in case".

Things today really aren't that crazy compared to what they could be like. Things will probably trend more towards normalcy in the next few months. But I know if things go bad, my immediate friends and family will be a bit more comfortable for a while longer than many of those around me.

I think part of it is that people in US have historically faced only several major disruptions ( 1939 depression being one of them ). Most people here have very limited idea how things work, when things are not conveniently available and don't seem all that comfortable with all the new ways they are being fleeced ( bots buying popular items, algorithms tricking them into paying more ).

That's quiet an extremist statement. There's quiet a few ticks on the continium from nuclear fallout bunker to a few months of food and water.

My definition of "preppers" is a lot more specific than "people who stockpile some essential goods to see themselves through basic disasters or disruptions".

If you can increase your stock and not have to spend from your stockpile, is there really scarcity?

I really appreciate your remembering and recounting this history. It's clear to me that I believed the "like the normal flu" concept at the time ... I even posted here on HN about that.

I agree with your take that the impact on America could have been much smaller in all sorts of scenarios, including just taking it more seriously sooner (like during the time frame that you're recounting).

I'm not sure that the travel ban from China in particular would have significantly affected the course of the pandemic in the U.S. We now know that COVID is very often totally asymptomatic and that it had already spread to many countries (possibly including the U.S.) by January of last year. People arriving from countries other than China could easily have introduced it into the U.S., and very possibly did (and certainly have many times since then). The U.S. didn't have the testing or tracing or quarantine capabilities to control the transmission of the epidemic in the community.

This skepticism is not meant to take away from your other points, which all seem right to me. I think many other kinds of responses (or awareness or understanding on the part of the American public) could have had a big effect last January or February. The responses, awareness, and understanding we actually got were terrible.

Most news from whatever source seems to be more about pandering to the partisan loyalties of the majority of their readers to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Honest evaluation tends to be used as ammunition by the "side" not being evaluated. "They hate us but even they say their guys were terrible here!"

The NYT has gone down this path far further than I would have thought possible. The WSJ is now owned by Murdoch so its less surprising that their news reporting has also slipped. Those are the two best. By a margin.

There's a massive problem that isn't being talked about because "Them! They're evil! Just look at what they say about..."

edit: I did something similar stocking up based on the Guardian (yeah, not an ideal source) reporting that a woman from Wuhan crossed the country with no symptoms for Chinese New Year and gave the virus to her whole family. She never had symptoms. I thought at that point, this is on, there's a non-negligible chance this will not be contained, so get prepared.

The travel ban was declared by the WHO as ineffective, since the virus was already across the world, with places like Italy already being hot spots for it, so banning travel from China directly was useless and was indeed racially motivated ( the China virus, we banned travel from there, the problem is "solved") on some idiotic level.

I don't know why you're signaling out NY politicians, who, as stupid as they were with the initial handling, at least changed course when they understood - many others across the US refused to do so well in the pandemic, when it was painfully obvious how contagious and deadly the virus is.

In going off on a tangent

If nothing else, this has showed movies to be far removed fron reality. I imagine in hollywood, the US government takes something like a virus of questionable origin quite seriously. Not just because it can kill you but because it might mutate and a deadly strain might surface and do the real damage.

The real response was hard to fathom for most of the world. How can the most powerful nation on earth struggle so badly? More so since we live in the digitally connected age where data is plenty. Does this mean if we had an alien invasion they'd dysfunction as bad as they did? Its outrageous really.

Being prepped and having the financial muscle to buy supplies for months in advance is well and good but most people arent in such good financial terms. Therefore prepping is a function of time and money where money is the determining factor.

Not a lot of people have a lot of money. As much as they'd like to get into the practice anti-fragility, the economics disagrees with them

The virus was already in the US in December: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...

It's funny how much memories change with time. I almost forgot that the surgeon general and Health Canada recommended against wearing masks, and that the motto was that the real danger was fear/hoarding/overreaction.

You have to remember that before COVID19, we had SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu. All of these were huge news panics, lots of people got scared and started prepping for the end of the world, but for people in the west it largely ended up a nothing-burger. In the early days it's hard to know how bad something really is. Especially with the early info out of China being so unreliable (e.g. all those videos of people randomly falling down in public)

But once it hit Italy bad, there were no more excuses.

"deadly lies"

I agree with a fair bit of what you are saying here but their behaviour in most cases does not comport with the definition of "lie".

I agree with the thrust of your comment in general. I thought that Trump’s China travel ban was a choice of common sense and the Democrats labeling it as xenophobic was counterproductive.

While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.

Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.

All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.

It's not just the wrong recommendations that have contributed to deaths, they have also undermined trust in governmental advice heavily by changing the narrative so fast.

They should do well to remember people aren't goldfish and have memories beyond three seconds.