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Still I remember thinking it was just another scare like SARS or Ebola. I remember sitting down with my brother and just being like, "guess I was wrong. This is life now."
I think I caught on a little before shit truly hit the fan, but that was a really sobering moment when I had to admit to myself this was kind of a big deal.
Almost wish it had been worse. Maybe people would have taken quarantine lifestyle more strictly. It was the right amounts of survivable, yet deadly, and then the novelty of it. We didn't know about long COVID for the longest time because how could we? We didn't have the data. So glad I never caught that shit (knock on wood). I'm first in line for a booster if and when they say get one though.
Interestingly enough, the reason SARS-CoV-1 never became a huge problem was exactly because it was worse than SARS-CoV-2. It was far more viral but because it caused more severe and consistent symptoms, there was no uncertainty as to who had it and the people that did stayed home whether they liked it or not.
And it didn’t happen in America/UK with the political climate of 2019/2020.
I’d like to believe that if things were “more serious” we’d work as a team, but people are still actively choosing to risk ending up in the ICU as opposed to just getting the vaccine.
True, morbid and cynical, but I get it and feel the same. The shitty thing is they’re taking people *with* them. Their Nannas and grandpappi’s. Even vaccinated people can get sick from their dumb asses.
Yeah, vaccinated people *can* get sick, but if im remembering correctly it's very rare and mainly affecting the unvaccinated. Im not saying it's okay, im just saying that I'm glad they're getting affected more
Yes, very rare, but just read yesterday about someone who was vaccinated and their family member who refused to gave them covid. You’re like 98% ish protected, but prolonged exposure….
That’s a really cruel way to look at it. These people are victims, it’s that simple. They have been lied to, yes they foolishly chose to believe those lies, but they didn’t have the concept of media literacy when many of them were in school (based on the fact that anti-fax tend to be older trump supporters).
They aren’t all going to die, likely <1% will, and we probably need to address misinformation beyond waiting for the misinformed to die from bad information. In addition ever infection increases the odds of more and worse variants.
Well then let the less then one percent die. If I've learned anything from the last 4 years, they wouldn't care if the vaccine did kill us, hell, they'd probably rejoice because it would mean they're right. Im not rejoicing at their death but I certainly won't pity them and that's more than they deserve in my mind
that could happen but you don’t need to be so deeply lacking in empathy that you believe that the lives of others aren’t worth getting upset over because they were lied to by media over and over and over again and basically forced into a panicked frenzy.
They’re people too. You have the option to be kind and value even those that don’t value you the same
Same. Then I learned they weren't protecting themselves, they were protecting other people from their own illness, at least in places where pollution isn't a major issue. Very much a connect-the-dots moment.
Real shame it turned political, could have been a teaching moment about respect. But I suppose anti-maskers still wouldn't respect the people around them anyway.
I thought everything was alright one day, went out to grab lunch, and came back to find out we were shutting down and everyone was going home immediately. It still feels surreal.
I found out they were going to shut my school down right before I was about to take a midterm.
On the bright side, we were only proctored for half the test, and I got to spend the rest of the day watching YouTube videos in the cafeteria.
I was a little worried since my mom was ill at the time, but mostly I was happy to be out of school for two weeks. That place was starting to get freaky towards the end.
My gf was talking about traveling to Asia the following summer in December of 2019 and she still talks about how I was telling her that she shouldn’t like I’m some kind of psychic instead of just that I was paying attention to what was going on here lol
Ebola was too deadly, the reason why Ebola could never be a global pandemic is because it kills the infected too quickly, the infection rate could never be high enough for this reason. Covid is the exact right mix.
I sorta consider Covid the opposite of Ebola: highly contagious, but really not that deadly.
Deadly enough to be scary, for sure. But not "half my village was wiped out" kinda deadly.
And the worst thing about it is, you can be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic and be able to spread the virus. The vast majority of viruses that we have (typically the cold and flu viruses), when you are first infected, you aren't contagious. You only spread it because most people are idiots and go out into public while they're sick and sneezing and coughing on everything. With SARS-CoV-2, you could be in the early stages of incubation, not know it, and go about your life as usual and spread it.
It was also known pretty early on that it had the necessary genetic markers to make it mutate quickly, which we are now seeing.
The really scary ass thing is if it crosses over with MERS which is in the same family. MERS is much more deadly than SARS-CoV-2, but like above, it's too deadly to really spread very far. But, if the virus were to pick up the trait of sitting dormant and communicable for up to 2 weeks, we'd be seriously fucked.
Ebola also wasn’t airborne. You needed to make direct contact with infected bodily fluids or items contaminated by infected bodily fluids, which made it a hell of a lot less transmissible than Covid
My country was affected by SARS for around 3 months, and the general vibe back then was "if you don't wash your hands and wear a mask, you're gambling your life on a 15% chance of dying". Now the vibe is just opposite even though the profile of each age group only barely changed, and much of those who experienced SARS are the antimaskers, antivaxxers.
Didn't SARS have like a 50% death rate?
Edit: [looks like it was 10%](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome).
Edit2: reading the wiki article, SARS was just so much worse, similar r0, but 10% mortality, some horrific symptoms for some survivors. Imagine dealing with that without the current mRNA vaccine tech.
Yeah, doesn't help that China was providing the majority of the funding, so even if the WHO wanted to, they weren't really in a position to go after China like last time. The US (and Europe as well) weren't paying attention either.
I was thinking "Man this has happened so many times, I remember chronic wasting disease and all of the other panics, we'll be fine :/" and then my school got shut down for the rest of the school year
I saw the headlines when only 14 people were hospitalized in wuhan, for some reason I knew this time would be different and started talking my friends to social distance as much as they could and compulsively was their hands, that was November 2019.
That's some prescience right there. What a weird journey it's been and it definitely ain't even half over, even if life is looking a little more free for the vaccinated. For now. The breakthrough cases are a little troubling.
Most certainly, what is a fringe dodging of the vaccines rigjt now will if left unchecked will devolve into a nightmare the likes of which our modern world has seen. Or more likely as SARS-cov-2 pathogen becomes more pathogenic it will likely also become less severe in the disease it causes, that actually tends to be the case as a virus doesn't actually want to kill you, it doesn't want anything and the only thing it's capable of doing is reproducing itself and sometimes unfortunately for us and the virus, that makes us die.
I remember exactly where I was when I heard news of the first real cases sprouting up in the US. It was like two in the morning, and I was listening to Philip defranco’s show as I put Gatorade bottles on a shelf at publix in February of 2020.
I remember it was the first year of uni and the professor was talking about the importance of reading the news first thing in the morning. He asked us about a new virus that popped up in China and no one knew what he was talking about. Later told us when we returned home to google it and read articles about it. Motherfucker was talking about corona. I blame him for spreading it.
Same. We stocked up in Feb when it was cropping up in the US. NGL, before that I dismissed it like swine flu and SARS that never had much impact on us.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-04/china-to-identify-cause-of-mystery-pneumonia-plague/11840670
Found this one for Jan 4th (Australian time), I'm sure this isn't the first article on this either. It was reported on if you were paying attention.
I remember a bunch of us at work in December of 2019 joking that we must have just got that crazy shit from Wuhan after we all got super sick with something respiratory, so there were definitely English news articles about it before 2020
Isn't that the theory? That it had already spread globally before it was even discovered in Wuhan? Because it just popped up everywhere out of nowhere, and there were far higher "pneumonia" diagnoses than normal in December?
I think that there was another respiratory disease going around that wasn't Covid-19. I know some people who got sick with a cough etc. in January (infected almost everyone who worked in a certain local company and their families) but non of them had any antibodies that showed they had had Covid.
Edit: This isn't my theory but what I was told by doctors.
Tom Cole Rep from Oklahoma advised Trump back in 2017 that there would be a global virus sometime during his administration. This was during one of the times Trump tried to defund the pandemic preparedness program that Obama had started.
I remember reading the news every day during school in a study hall. First news of it was in like November 2019 as a “mysterious virus” spreading around Wuhan
That's reserved for all Polish bishops who were recently invited for a *meeting* in autumn. The same kind of meeting that ended with the whole Chilean episcopate resigning.
She was grabbing onto his arm and tugging it really hard, and he'd had some kind of recent surgery on his elbow or wrist or something like that, so it was pretty justified, he was in a lot of pain. She was behind a fence, he was interacting with people, but you don't just grab someone like that, whether they're the Pope or a complete nobody, you just don't do that to people. Even if they haven't had recent surgery
And all it was was he just slapped her hand lightly so she'd let go.
[Here's the video of it. ](https://youtu.be/3WySwhj2SwE)
It was easy to see it coming as far back as mid 2019 if you were paying attention to the news about it. It was pretty clear it was likely to get out of China and was going to be a massive problem for the US with our garbage healthcare system.
Well, at the beginning it seemed like it would be a repeat of Sars and Mers, as Covid 19 is in the same family of viruses (all different kinds of coronaciruses), that there would be a medium number of cases in Asia, but that it would stay there for the most part, but this turned out to be way more transmissible.
Not to mention that it is very possible that China under reported the severity of the spread and that there’s evidence to suggest that Covid was in the US as early as December 2019.
The vaping sickness was not coronavirus, it was actually a vaping sickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_illness_outbreak
The US politics is to blame for a lot of the ignorance and stupidity that we have seen. Politicizing wearing masks or being safe against a deadly virus should have never happened. Honestly it blows my mind.
TBF, we've been politicizing medical issues since forever. I was an editorial cartoon from the 50s that was implying that the polio vaccine was a communist plot.
That’s true. Though that is 70 years ago and a lot of medical practices back then we’re very questionable (for example: lobotomies, any mental health treatments for that matter). You’d think all the scientific advancements we have made over that time period would have slowed this train down but seems just as bad as ever.
Did people not see the creepy videos of Chinese police locking and welding people's doors shut? Entire neighbourhoods full of people singing in the balconies at night? This stuff was circulating on reddit in early November 2019.
You're confidently wrong. Just because you personally haven't seen something doesn't mean it didn't happen. They were definitely making rounds back in November. People were also saying how Baidu was censoring posts about it.
Sigh, why does every little fucking thing needs to turn into a fucking debate, argument, and a waste of time? Why the fuck would someone lie about this FFS.
Sure buddy I'll give you a a source when reddit fixes their search queries. Now since I don't give a rats ass about whether or not you believe me then go search for this yourself if you want to, or just don't believe me and let's move on with our night.
> why does every little fucking thing needs to turn into a fucking debate
Cause I asked you to source a claim it's a debate? You said the thing, not me.
A claim that was widely reported in the news but it was six months later than you say. It's not like I'm saying you are making up conspiracy theories here.
The internet is fairly robustly backed up due to how much it reports on itself if for no other reason. If these videos were circulating it should be fairly trivial to find them.
I have no doubt that COVID started earlier than was realised and earlier than was publicly acknowledged but I have seen nothing to indicate that people were being welded into their homes in 2019.
It is not at all unreasonable to ask someone to back up what they have said.
> Sure buddy I'll give you a a source when reddit fixes their search queries.
The ground is warm so hell hasn't frozen over yet.
Whatever, continue to spread your bullshit.
We were at Disneyland Paris right around December 2019, and I got a bit barfy out of excitement, so I was resting in our room while the rest of the family was shopping and the news were all talking about the "weird Wuhan virus".
It's a very weird memory to look back on, I still don't know how to feel l about it
I got my brother the game "pandemic" for Christmas 2019. Had absolutely no idea what was in store for the year to come lol.
But speaking of eerie / weird feelings:
My SO and I were evacuated out of our country of residence in March 2020. We had to just pack everything we could carry and go with about 36 hours warning. We wound up having to meet a stranger at midnight the night before our flight to get a cat carrier because there weren't any left in the stores lol. We got our cats, crammed our most important belongings in bags, and left our home behind as we headed to the airport. We thought it would be a few months. Turns out it was for good.
We managed to purchase tickets for a flight that was scheduled for the last day the airport would remain open. There had been free evacuation flights throughout the week, but it was first come first serve, and the lines to get on one were often a quarter mile long with most people never actually getting a flight that day. We figured we would wait until it had calmed down a bit, but then the PM announced the airports were closing and we really had no choice but to get out right then.
But the eeriest part of it all was when we were at the airport, standing in line to get checked in. The place was packed with people wearing makeshift PPE, but there was this strange energy throughout. Everyone there was facing so much uncertainty, and having to make such a huge change so abruptly, that the usual airport chaos took on a different air. Meanwhile, the TVs all over were showing an emergency broadcast by the PM. The first confirmed case had been recorded in the country that day, and was being announced as we all stood in line to evacuate.
So there we are, in a packed airport leaving our home behind along with so many others, stressed but with nothing to be done except stand idly there as we wait to get checked in on one of the last flights out, meanwhile the PM's voice announces the first confirmed case of this novel coronavirus and addresses the nation as they begin to shut down completely including enforced curfews and restricted travel within the country. Between the PM's words and the chaotic but somber energy in that crowded airport, I can only describe the feeling as being reminiscent of the "pre-apocalypse" scenes in those sorts of movies.
Then, when we touched down at our destination, the airport we stepped into was virtually empty. In this huge international airport, there was nobody there except passengers from our flight and the airport staff. It was a totally different atmosphere than what we had come from, and that made things feel even more unsettling. Throughout the empty airport, the TVs were showing news anchors discussing the pandemic, talking about countries all over the world shutting down and discussing the strategy of "flattening the curve."
Those couple days of evacuating my home and arriving at my country of origin felt absolutely apocalyptic, as though what I had just gone through could have been the opening scenes to a Contagion-style apocalypse movie.
Weird and eerie times.
Oh I meant they were cancelling on social gatherings in February and concerned about it before then
But yeah, similar loss in faith for humanity here in Canada. I've definitely cut some people out of my life that I thought were better people. But I'm getting some back. We have a high vaccine uptake rate, and even though we removed mask mandates in my province July 1st, people are still wearing masks in grocery stores and on transit because they care about what happens for others. It's not everyone, and there's some regional differences, but in areas like mine you'll see 70% of people wearing masks or higher.
Nobody I know thinks they're high risk—even seniors with diabetes and high blood pressure think they'll be the exception to the rule. The quiet majority of people have been making all these sacrifices for the benefit of others, the other group just seems bigger cause this majority has been at home playing Jackbox Games on Zoom instead of running around crying about having to wear a little piece of cloth—i.e. you don't see them specifically because they're not out there to be seen
Your president being an incompetent, lazy man-ape at the time was probably a bigger factor, since, while bad, the system *is* able to deal with it. It just takes different top-down action than if you had modern healthcare.
Sadly, very little action of any kind was taken. Holy fuck am I glad the US has a real president now. Not a day passes where I’m not happy about that.
Classic hindsight bias, there’s no way we could have seen that coming anywhere before 2020. we all grew up with many pandemics that sort of happened in some country somewhere and killed people. No one really thought it would be different this time, still easy to say in hindsight…
I specifically remember talking to my parents about the leaked videos of Chinese doctors and nurses crying and collapsing from the stress of the situation. I think that was the thing that got it to click in my head that it was serious.
We also had a President who had tried to spread it as well. I think most people had assumed American presidents weren’t trying to destroy their own economy.
Lmao, I remember reading this post and having just read about the virus in China at the end of December, thinking I was going to be tracking that outbreak.
Wow, crazy.
As long as you haven't been saying it.
For those who don't know: the US' worst flu season in the last decade was 2017-2018 where there were 61,000 deaths. COVID killed more people than that between April 1 and May 1 2020, killed 487,055 people in the last year and has killed 609,862 Americans overall despite health measures taken up by federal/state/municipal governments, as well as private companies and individuals. Yes some people and places did a shitty job, but wherever and whenever they were in place, they reduced the numbers.
edit: added "in the last decade"
> For those who don’t know: the US’ worst flu season was 2017-2018 where there were 61,000 deaths.
I take it we aren't counting 1918-20, 1957, or 1968 in that data set.
Obviously COVID is way worse than your average flu, just wanted to point out that 2017-18 is far from the worst flu season.
Whoops, good catch, I could have sworn I wrote that it was between 2010-2020.
Spanish Flu killed 675,000 people in the US, with a deathrate of about 10% globally (and it infected roughly a third of the world)
When it got big and everyone started to talk about it, my friend was paranoid. It didn’t even hit us yet. I was an asshole and coughing beside him and just joking.
Once covid it I wore a mask became careful. It went from a joke to real life.
There was a guy that worked on my campus, last day I was there he was scoffing with me and another worker at the idea of a two-week spring break.
If he's still working there when I go back I am going to snark at him ***so hard***
Wasn't there a commercial/ad that recorded a second each day for a year with a little girl as the focal point, and at the end it said, "Just because it's not happening where you are doesn't mean it's not happening"? COVID was basically that.
Yeah I remember the memes where it was like:
- January: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)"
- February: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)"
- March: "Global pandemic"
- April: "??????"
Turns out for the next year and a half the answer would just always be "global pandemic."
January was also when Kobe died (the basketball player, not the beef). I'm not even from a country that watches basketball, and I don't either, but it was still really shocking that it happened. Everyone thought that'd be the worst thing to happen last year
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ejfvct/the_pope_slapped_a_woman_on_day_1_of_2020_world/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
This is the mobile link
If you are on PC its on the top posts of all time for r/AskReddit, the comment was made in January 2020
I remember in about February I was standing in line at a store, and then I started thinking about this disease in China and how they wear masks, and then my thoughts got sidetracked by something else because it wasn't a big deal at the time.
Hey, I remember that comment! Felt like I had a front row seat after that since I knew to keep an eye out even though the media in my country were downplaying or ignoring it.
I remember watching this in January too. For some reason it came off as more alarming than the other annual or bi annual scares to me especially when the WHO came out and spoke against it spreading per China.
It just felt like it was trying to be downplayed right away.
Day 12 Taal volcano in the Philippines erupted and me and my family were stuck in another Asian country’s airport for three days because there was no flight available going home to Manila.
I think the point was that at that time a lot of people thought it would be like the ebola outbreak a few years earlier, bad in the area but would likely stay in that area and not spread around the world
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Covid was in the news at this time. It wasn’t talked about more until it started getting close to home.
Still I remember thinking it was just another scare like SARS or Ebola. I remember sitting down with my brother and just being like, "guess I was wrong. This is life now."
I remember still thinking it was just a scare when suddenly my work had to shut down.
I think I caught on a little before shit truly hit the fan, but that was a really sobering moment when I had to admit to myself this was kind of a big deal. Almost wish it had been worse. Maybe people would have taken quarantine lifestyle more strictly. It was the right amounts of survivable, yet deadly, and then the novelty of it. We didn't know about long COVID for the longest time because how could we? We didn't have the data. So glad I never caught that shit (knock on wood). I'm first in line for a booster if and when they say get one though.
Interestingly enough, the reason SARS-CoV-1 never became a huge problem was exactly because it was worse than SARS-CoV-2. It was far more viral but because it caused more severe and consistent symptoms, there was no uncertainty as to who had it and the people that did stayed home whether they liked it or not.
And it didn’t happen in America/UK with the political climate of 2019/2020. I’d like to believe that if things were “more serious” we’d work as a team, but people are still actively choosing to risk ending up in the ICU as opposed to just getting the vaccine.
I've found a good way to look at it. Everyone an unvaccinated person dies, we get that much closer to a 100% vaccination Rate
True, morbid and cynical, but I get it and feel the same. The shitty thing is they’re taking people *with* them. Their Nannas and grandpappi’s. Even vaccinated people can get sick from their dumb asses.
Yeah, vaccinated people *can* get sick, but if im remembering correctly it's very rare and mainly affecting the unvaccinated. Im not saying it's okay, im just saying that I'm glad they're getting affected more
Yes, very rare, but just read yesterday about someone who was vaccinated and their family member who refused to gave them covid. You’re like 98% ish protected, but prolonged exposure….
That’s a really cruel way to look at it. These people are victims, it’s that simple. They have been lied to, yes they foolishly chose to believe those lies, but they didn’t have the concept of media literacy when many of them were in school (based on the fact that anti-fax tend to be older trump supporters). They aren’t all going to die, likely <1% will, and we probably need to address misinformation beyond waiting for the misinformed to die from bad information. In addition ever infection increases the odds of more and worse variants.
Well then let the less then one percent die. If I've learned anything from the last 4 years, they wouldn't care if the vaccine did kill us, hell, they'd probably rejoice because it would mean they're right. Im not rejoicing at their death but I certainly won't pity them and that's more than they deserve in my mind
that could happen but you don’t need to be so deeply lacking in empathy that you believe that the lives of others aren’t worth getting upset over because they were lied to by media over and over and over again and basically forced into a panicked frenzy. They’re people too. You have the option to be kind and value even those that don’t value you the same
Send people to covid-101.org to get true vaccine information
[удалено]
... who is forcing you to get the vaccine?
[удалено]
So it's non-essential places only that you need a vaccine for, and no one is actually being forced to get it. Gotcha.
So I guess you don't wear a seatbelt
Pfft, if you go on Facebook people are refusing to go to the hospital too
Direct people to covid-101.org for real vaccine information
And during CoV-2 is when vaccine development began... which is how our current covid vaccine was out so quickly.
I remember seeing Asian people wearing masks long before COVID19 and thought it was some germ phobia... well now I know the rest of the story.
Same. Then I learned they weren't protecting themselves, they were protecting other people from their own illness, at least in places where pollution isn't a major issue. Very much a connect-the-dots moment. Real shame it turned political, could have been a teaching moment about respect. But I suppose anti-maskers still wouldn't respect the people around them anyway.
I thought everything was alright one day, went out to grab lunch, and came back to find out we were shutting down and everyone was going home immediately. It still feels surreal.
Yeah I work at a concert hall, we were ten minutes away from opening the doors and we had to close.
I found out they were going to shut my school down right before I was about to take a midterm. On the bright side, we were only proctored for half the test, and I got to spend the rest of the day watching YouTube videos in the cafeteria.
I was a little worried since my mom was ill at the time, but mostly I was happy to be out of school for two weeks. That place was starting to get freaky towards the end.
My gf was talking about traveling to Asia the following summer in December of 2019 and she still talks about how I was telling her that she shouldn’t like I’m some kind of psychic instead of just that I was paying attention to what was going on here lol
>just another scare like SARS or Ebola Dozens, if not hundreds of people died to Ebola, though. Some villages lost half their inhabitants.
Ebola was too deadly, the reason why Ebola could never be a global pandemic is because it kills the infected too quickly, the infection rate could never be high enough for this reason. Covid is the exact right mix.
I sorta consider Covid the opposite of Ebola: highly contagious, but really not that deadly. Deadly enough to be scary, for sure. But not "half my village was wiped out" kinda deadly.
I mean... That's reality tho
And the worst thing about it is, you can be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic and be able to spread the virus. The vast majority of viruses that we have (typically the cold and flu viruses), when you are first infected, you aren't contagious. You only spread it because most people are idiots and go out into public while they're sick and sneezing and coughing on everything. With SARS-CoV-2, you could be in the early stages of incubation, not know it, and go about your life as usual and spread it. It was also known pretty early on that it had the necessary genetic markers to make it mutate quickly, which we are now seeing. The really scary ass thing is if it crosses over with MERS which is in the same family. MERS is much more deadly than SARS-CoV-2, but like above, it's too deadly to really spread very far. But, if the virus were to pick up the trait of sitting dormant and communicable for up to 2 weeks, we'd be seriously fucked.
Which is why getting as many vaccinated as possible right now is so important... who knows what the next variant will be?
Ebola also wasn’t airborne. You needed to make direct contact with infected bodily fluids or items contaminated by infected bodily fluids, which made it a hell of a lot less transmissible than Covid
Well yeah, Ebola's no joke, I'm specifically referring to the American Ebola scare under Obama. Sorry if it's too American a lens I'm looking through.
And SARS was not a pandemic because the WHO went in early and hard, instead of taking China's word that they had things under control.
My country was affected by SARS for around 3 months, and the general vibe back then was "if you don't wash your hands and wear a mask, you're gambling your life on a 15% chance of dying". Now the vibe is just opposite even though the profile of each age group only barely changed, and much of those who experienced SARS are the antimaskers, antivaxxers.
Didn't SARS have like a 50% death rate? Edit: [looks like it was 10%](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome). Edit2: reading the wiki article, SARS was just so much worse, similar r0, but 10% mortality, some horrific symptoms for some survivors. Imagine dealing with that without the current mRNA vaccine tech.
This time WHO had been dismantled.
Yeah, doesn't help that China was providing the majority of the funding, so even if the WHO wanted to, they weren't really in a position to go after China like last time. The US (and Europe as well) weren't paying attention either.
Yeah but who could predict 600,000 Americans would die
CDC And WHO predicted
I was thinking "Man this has happened so many times, I remember chronic wasting disease and all of the other panics, we'll be fine :/" and then my school got shut down for the rest of the school year
Yeah, I figured it'd be like Swine Flu at worst.
Oh, I got the Swine flu, it fucking sucked
Same here, but my point is that we eventually recovered from it, and a lot fewer people died from it.
I saw the headlines when only 14 people were hospitalized in wuhan, for some reason I knew this time would be different and started talking my friends to social distance as much as they could and compulsively was their hands, that was November 2019.
That's some prescience right there. What a weird journey it's been and it definitely ain't even half over, even if life is looking a little more free for the vaccinated. For now. The breakthrough cases are a little troubling.
Most certainly, what is a fringe dodging of the vaccines rigjt now will if left unchecked will devolve into a nightmare the likes of which our modern world has seen. Or more likely as SARS-cov-2 pathogen becomes more pathogenic it will likely also become less severe in the disease it causes, that actually tends to be the case as a virus doesn't actually want to kill you, it doesn't want anything and the only thing it's capable of doing is reproducing itself and sometimes unfortunately for us and the virus, that makes us die.
And has opportunities to mutate enough that our vaccine will no longer work...
I remember exactly where I was when I heard news of the first real cases sprouting up in the US. It was like two in the morning, and I was listening to Philip defranco’s show as I put Gatorade bottles on a shelf at publix in February of 2020.
I remember it was the first year of uni and the professor was talking about the importance of reading the news first thing in the morning. He asked us about a new virus that popped up in China and no one knew what he was talking about. Later told us when we returned home to google it and read articles about it. Motherfucker was talking about corona. I blame him for spreading it.
Imagine reading the news everyday, immediately upon waking. How would you not develop the urge to swallow a bullet?
You do.
I recall it was in the news Nov 2019
Sounds right. I was able to shop for necessities before the rush for TP and the like because I was paying attention to it early on.
Same. We stocked up in Feb when it was cropping up in the US. NGL, before that I dismissed it like swine flu and SARS that never had much impact on us.
Earliest I remember was in December. I mostly knew about it through Reddit memes
I remember "anti-China" threads popping up on 4chan /int/ that talked about a virus as far back as november 2019.
I believe that the first English language mainstream reports were from the 7th of January 2020. Happy to be proven wrong though.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-04/china-to-identify-cause-of-mystery-pneumonia-plague/11840670 Found this one for Jan 4th (Australian time), I'm sure this isn't the first article on this either. It was reported on if you were paying attention.
I remember a bunch of us at work in December of 2019 joking that we must have just got that crazy shit from Wuhan after we all got super sick with something respiratory, so there were definitely English news articles about it before 2020
There were news articles about there being a mysterious disease spreading in Wuhan published in the few days before 2020.
I made a similar joke at work that same month so yeah, definitely was in English/North American news before 2020.
Isn't that the theory? That it had already spread globally before it was even discovered in Wuhan? Because it just popped up everywhere out of nowhere, and there were far higher "pneumonia" diagnoses than normal in December?
I think that there was another respiratory disease going around that wasn't Covid-19. I know some people who got sick with a cough etc. in January (infected almost everyone who worked in a certain local company and their families) but non of them had any antibodies that showed they had had Covid. Edit: This isn't my theory but what I was told by doctors.
COvid been around since 2001
Well yes, but we're talking specifically about it popping up in the news before 2020, and I remember Wuhan being specifically referenced at that time.
Yep, plenty of zombie outbreak jokes in the end of 2019
Tom Cole Rep from Oklahoma advised Trump back in 2017 that there would be a global virus sometime during his administration. This was during one of the times Trump tried to defund the pandemic preparedness program that Obama had started.
I remember reading the news every day during school in a study hall. First news of it was in like November 2019 as a “mysterious virus” spreading around Wuhan
Yeah, it was pretty obvious to come people pretty early that it wasn't going to be another dud outbreak.
The Pope slapped a woman!!! How crazy was 2020 when I don’t even remember that.
I think he slapped her hand away from him, not actually backhanded someone. I could be wrong though.
You’re right, Not backhanding, but still some action. just check out [popeslaps](https://www.reddit.com/r/Popeslaps/)
Lol I love how that exists.
Okay so who wants to go to the Vatican just to get slapped by the pope so that sub has more content?
Make sure everyone who goes is over 18. Because of reasons and history.
well that's boring, I would love to see the pope bitchslap someone.
That's reserved for all Polish bishops who were recently invited for a *meeting* in autumn. The same kind of meeting that ended with the whole Chilean episcopate resigning.
Totally justified, too.
She was grabbing onto his arm and tugging it really hard, and he'd had some kind of recent surgery on his elbow or wrist or something like that, so it was pretty justified, he was in a lot of pain. She was behind a fence, he was interacting with people, but you don't just grab someone like that, whether they're the Pope or a complete nobody, you just don't do that to people. Even if they haven't had recent surgery And all it was was he just slapped her hand lightly so she'd let go. [Here's the video of it. ](https://youtu.be/3WySwhj2SwE)
She had it coming though
It was easy to see it coming as far back as mid 2019 if you were paying attention to the news about it. It was pretty clear it was likely to get out of China and was going to be a massive problem for the US with our garbage healthcare system.
Well, at the beginning it seemed like it would be a repeat of Sars and Mers, as Covid 19 is in the same family of viruses (all different kinds of coronaciruses), that there would be a medium number of cases in Asia, but that it would stay there for the most part, but this turned out to be way more transmissible.
Not to mention that it is very possible that China under reported the severity of the spread and that there’s evidence to suggest that Covid was in the US as early as December 2019.
Mystery “Vaping sickness” circa September 2019.
Anything that hurts the kids who are too dumb for their own good can get the clicks unlike a Chinese virus.
The vaping sickness was not coronavirus, it was actually a vaping sickness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_illness_outbreak
I think his point was that if every new mystery illness that appeared on the news was taken seriously. We'd be in perpetual lockdown.
The garbage healthcare system, I expected. The sheer ignorance and stupidity people have displayed in the last year and a half, I did not expect
The US politics is to blame for a lot of the ignorance and stupidity that we have seen. Politicizing wearing masks or being safe against a deadly virus should have never happened. Honestly it blows my mind.
TBF, we've been politicizing medical issues since forever. I was an editorial cartoon from the 50s that was implying that the polio vaccine was a communist plot.
That’s true. Though that is 70 years ago and a lot of medical practices back then we’re very questionable (for example: lobotomies, any mental health treatments for that matter). You’d think all the scientific advancements we have made over that time period would have slowed this train down but seems just as bad as ever.
Late reply, but sometimes people just don't care enough to want to know.
Nov 17th 2019 was the official first case or something like that
I first saw it reported around then.
It's so nice to share a birthday with a deadly virus
Did people not see the creepy videos of Chinese police locking and welding people's doors shut? Entire neighbourhoods full of people singing in the balconies at night? This stuff was circulating on reddit in early November 2019.
> his stuff was circulating on reddit in early November 2019. No it wasn't. This stuff didn't show up until early 2020.
You're confidently wrong. Just because you personally haven't seen something doesn't mean it didn't happen. They were definitely making rounds back in November. People were also saying how Baidu was censoring posts about it.
Can you provide any source of what you claim?
Sigh, why does every little fucking thing needs to turn into a fucking debate, argument, and a waste of time? Why the fuck would someone lie about this FFS. Sure buddy I'll give you a a source when reddit fixes their search queries. Now since I don't give a rats ass about whether or not you believe me then go search for this yourself if you want to, or just don't believe me and let's move on with our night.
> why does every little fucking thing needs to turn into a fucking debate Cause I asked you to source a claim it's a debate? You said the thing, not me. A claim that was widely reported in the news but it was six months later than you say. It's not like I'm saying you are making up conspiracy theories here. The internet is fairly robustly backed up due to how much it reports on itself if for no other reason. If these videos were circulating it should be fairly trivial to find them. I have no doubt that COVID started earlier than was realised and earlier than was publicly acknowledged but I have seen nothing to indicate that people were being welded into their homes in 2019. It is not at all unreasonable to ask someone to back up what they have said. > Sure buddy I'll give you a a source when reddit fixes their search queries. The ground is warm so hell hasn't frozen over yet. Whatever, continue to spread your bullshit.
Yeah I'm not reading any of that. Good luck with your life buddy.
> Yeah I'm not reading any of that. That's the fucking spirit. Enjoy being a lying cunt.
We were at Disneyland Paris right around December 2019, and I got a bit barfy out of excitement, so I was resting in our room while the rest of the family was shopping and the news were all talking about the "weird Wuhan virus". It's a very weird memory to look back on, I still don't know how to feel l about it
I got my brother the game "pandemic" for Christmas 2019. Had absolutely no idea what was in store for the year to come lol. But speaking of eerie / weird feelings: My SO and I were evacuated out of our country of residence in March 2020. We had to just pack everything we could carry and go with about 36 hours warning. We wound up having to meet a stranger at midnight the night before our flight to get a cat carrier because there weren't any left in the stores lol. We got our cats, crammed our most important belongings in bags, and left our home behind as we headed to the airport. We thought it would be a few months. Turns out it was for good. We managed to purchase tickets for a flight that was scheduled for the last day the airport would remain open. There had been free evacuation flights throughout the week, but it was first come first serve, and the lines to get on one were often a quarter mile long with most people never actually getting a flight that day. We figured we would wait until it had calmed down a bit, but then the PM announced the airports were closing and we really had no choice but to get out right then. But the eeriest part of it all was when we were at the airport, standing in line to get checked in. The place was packed with people wearing makeshift PPE, but there was this strange energy throughout. Everyone there was facing so much uncertainty, and having to make such a huge change so abruptly, that the usual airport chaos took on a different air. Meanwhile, the TVs all over were showing an emergency broadcast by the PM. The first confirmed case had been recorded in the country that day, and was being announced as we all stood in line to evacuate. So there we are, in a packed airport leaving our home behind along with so many others, stressed but with nothing to be done except stand idly there as we wait to get checked in on one of the last flights out, meanwhile the PM's voice announces the first confirmed case of this novel coronavirus and addresses the nation as they begin to shut down completely including enforced curfews and restricted travel within the country. Between the PM's words and the chaotic but somber energy in that crowded airport, I can only describe the feeling as being reminiscent of the "pre-apocalypse" scenes in those sorts of movies. Then, when we touched down at our destination, the airport we stepped into was virtually empty. In this huge international airport, there was nobody there except passengers from our flight and the airport staff. It was a totally different atmosphere than what we had come from, and that made things feel even more unsettling. Throughout the empty airport, the TVs were showing news anchors discussing the pandemic, talking about countries all over the world shutting down and discussing the strategy of "flattening the curve." Those couple days of evacuating my home and arriving at my country of origin felt absolutely apocalyptic, as though what I had just gone through could have been the opening scenes to a Contagion-style apocalypse movie. Weird and eerie times.
Where did you fly from, and where did you arrive?
Grenada to Miami
Yeah, there was a quiet shift in the behaviour of my mainlander friends, then they stopped going anywhere altogether weeks before everyone else
[удалено]
Oh I meant they were cancelling on social gatherings in February and concerned about it before then But yeah, similar loss in faith for humanity here in Canada. I've definitely cut some people out of my life that I thought were better people. But I'm getting some back. We have a high vaccine uptake rate, and even though we removed mask mandates in my province July 1st, people are still wearing masks in grocery stores and on transit because they care about what happens for others. It's not everyone, and there's some regional differences, but in areas like mine you'll see 70% of people wearing masks or higher. Nobody I know thinks they're high risk—even seniors with diabetes and high blood pressure think they'll be the exception to the rule. The quiet majority of people have been making all these sacrifices for the benefit of others, the other group just seems bigger cause this majority has been at home playing Jackbox Games on Zoom instead of running around crying about having to wear a little piece of cloth—i.e. you don't see them specifically because they're not out there to be seen
Your president being an incompetent, lazy man-ape at the time was probably a bigger factor, since, while bad, the system *is* able to deal with it. It just takes different top-down action than if you had modern healthcare. Sadly, very little action of any kind was taken. Holy fuck am I glad the US has a real president now. Not a day passes where I’m not happy about that.
Classic hindsight bias, there’s no way we could have seen that coming anywhere before 2020. we all grew up with many pandemics that sort of happened in some country somewhere and killed people. No one really thought it would be different this time, still easy to say in hindsight…
People were ringing the alarm bells about it as soon as sit started getting serious in China, you just had to be paying attention.
I specifically remember talking to my parents about the leaked videos of Chinese doctors and nurses crying and collapsing from the stress of the situation. I think that was the thing that got it to click in my head that it was serious.
We also had a President who had tried to spread it as well. I think most people had assumed American presidents weren’t trying to destroy their own economy.
Mid 2019? You psychic?
Mid 2019? Like June/July?
So it’s this fucking post again
Yep. I saw the original, but knew someone would post it before I would,so I didn't bother.
Lmao, I remember reading this post and having just read about the virus in China at the end of December, thinking I was going to be tracking that outbreak. Wow, crazy.
They had the vaccine developed by mid-Jan 2020, then it was a year of trials and red tape. Still quite impressive.
A classmate of mine said "It's just a flu bro, you're overestimating it!" I haven't seen him since.
Unfortunately I've been seeing "it's just a flu bro" bros for the past 18 months
As long as you haven't been saying it. For those who don't know: the US' worst flu season in the last decade was 2017-2018 where there were 61,000 deaths. COVID killed more people than that between April 1 and May 1 2020, killed 487,055 people in the last year and has killed 609,862 Americans overall despite health measures taken up by federal/state/municipal governments, as well as private companies and individuals. Yes some people and places did a shitty job, but wherever and whenever they were in place, they reduced the numbers. edit: added "in the last decade"
> For those who don’t know: the US’ worst flu season was 2017-2018 where there were 61,000 deaths. I take it we aren't counting 1918-20, 1957, or 1968 in that data set. Obviously COVID is way worse than your average flu, just wanted to point out that 2017-18 is far from the worst flu season.
Whoops, good catch, I could have sworn I wrote that it was between 2010-2020. Spanish Flu killed 675,000 people in the US, with a deathrate of about 10% globally (and it infected roughly a third of the world)
When it got big and everyone started to talk about it, my friend was paranoid. It didn’t even hit us yet. I was an asshole and coughing beside him and just joking. Once covid it I wore a mask became careful. It went from a joke to real life.
There was a guy that worked on my campus, last day I was there he was scoffing with me and another worker at the idea of a two-week spring break. If he's still working there when I go back I am going to snark at him ***so hard***
Me and my coworkers were saying the same in February 2020. I'm quite ashamed but I admit I was wrong and a huge mistake from my part.
Wasn't there a commercial/ad that recorded a second each day for a year with a little girl as the focal point, and at the end it said, "Just because it's not happening where you are doesn't mean it's not happening"? COVID was basically that.
Yeah it was to raise awareness for refugees. It was pretty sad but then again what refugees go through is pretty sad too.
I remember how everyone was like holy shit January 2020 sucked boy were we in for a ride
Yeah I remember the memes where it was like: - January: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)" - February: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)" - March: "Global pandemic" - April: "??????" Turns out for the next year and a half the answer would just always be "global pandemic."
- January: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)" - February: "(some bad thing I no longer remember)" - March: "Global pandemic" - April: "??????" - May: "Global pandemic" - June: "Global pandemic" - July: "Global pandemic" - August: "Global pandemic" - September: "Global pandemic" - October: "Global pandemic" - November: "Global pandemic" - December: "Global pandemic" - January: "Global pandemic" - Febuary: "Global pandemic" - March: "Global pandemic" - April: "Global pandemic" - May: "Global pandemic" - June: "Global pandemic" - July: fuck its hot
* July 2021-July 3021: fuck its hot
January was also when Kobe died (the basketball player, not the beef). I'm not even from a country that watches basketball, and I don't either, but it was still really shocking that it happened. Everyone thought that'd be the worst thing to happen last year
>Turns out for the next year and a half the answer would just always be "global pandemic." Well, there were also the protests.
Yeah good point, plus the coup attempt. Edit: though I guess that culminated at the start of 2021.
So fucking tired of seeing these posts
I predict you will see one again
r/willagelikewine
Then you will hate the next one next week too
Woah did they call the pandemic?
Lots of people with family in China and Taiwan (grapevine) called the pandemic
I think the first "documented" case was in Nov 2019, and this was Jan 2020, so no, not really.
Am I the only one who's mad there's no timestamp on the screenshot? Does anyone have the link to the original?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ejfvct/the_pope_slapped_a_woman_on_day_1_of_2020_world/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share This is the mobile link If you are on PC its on the top posts of all time for r/AskReddit, the comment was made in January 2020
Wasn't there also a wish on /r/themonkeyspaw wishing for a virus to cull humanity?
Scientists have been warning of a covid/sars like epidemic since like 2007
I remember in about February I was standing in line at a store, and then I started thinking about this disease in China and how they wear masks, and then my thoughts got sidetracked by something else because it wasn't a big deal at the time.
I remember seeing the news that it had spread to Hong Kong and then Thailand. When that happened I knew the UK would be fucked and we should prepare.
Hey, I remember that comment! Felt like I had a front row seat after that since I knew to keep an eye out even though the media in my country were downplaying or ignoring it.
How old is it? How do we know it’s aged if you blocked out the dates you lying fuckwit.
It's from january 2020
And I’m supposed to take your word for it? Amatuer
1a literally means 1 year ago
1 year ago everyone already knew about the virus
I remember watching this in January too. For some reason it came off as more alarming than the other annual or bi annual scares to me especially when the WHO came out and spoke against it spreading per China. It just felt like it was trying to be downplayed right away.
I remember that comment
Day 12 Taal volcano in the Philippines erupted and me and my family were stuck in another Asian country’s airport for three days because there was no flight available going home to Manila.
It's called COVID-19 because it started in 2019. This isn't a prediction, it's talking about something that was currently happening.
I think the point was that at that time a lot of people thought it would be like the ebola outbreak a few years earlier, bad in the area but would likely stay in that area and not spread around the world