It’s hard to write about something and call it “huge” or a “game changer,” but this is the kind of information that I believe we won’t remember we didn’t know in the moment when we look back on this 10 years from now.
Apparently, US intelligence was warning about a pandemic in China in the fall, according to CNN. This is further evidence both of a coverup by the Chinese and negligence by our federal government, who could have easily supplied places like New York with the resources they needed in time if they had acted, and stopped the spread.
It is also a data point about California and may help further explain its our numbers. Stanford researchers are running antibody tests to follow up on this notion:
Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.
If this pans out, it poses further questions about why there wasn’t an earlier spike in California and about the effectiveness of testing in general, but it’s a rabbit hole we need to jump down to full do an after action review on this whole thing.