Luggard

Even a luggard like me 'knew' two things in early February:
- just because you've only found 50 cases of a highly infectious novel contagion doesn't mean you've avoided epidemic
- the already documented spread couldn't be driven just by coughing and sneezing infected; asymps had to be contagious, Typhoid Mary was real
- geometric progression fools you until it's too late

STAT has unlocked its Covid-19 stories, and this one is worth your time.

Then Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, gave me that Epidemiology 101 lesson: It takes time, she explained, for an outbreak to build to the exponential growth phase, where cases appear to mushroom and hospitals get overrun.

I suspect, but have yet to read from a 'professional', that the main reason for the lackadaisical response was the fact that earlier coronavirus infections exhibited short incubation/contagion periods and death tolls that were not impressive. In a nutshell, both SARS

The incubation period for SARS is typically 2 to 7 days
...
Available information suggests that persons with SARS are most likely to be contagious only when they have symptoms, such as fever or cough.

and MERS

The incubation period (the time between infection and start of symptoms) is about five days
...
The contagious period (the time that a sick animal or human is infectious) for MERS-CoV is not known but may last as long as virus is being shed.

incubated quickly and took out the patient long before he could infect many others.

The case fatality rate (CFR) in patients infected with MERS-CoV is high—estimated at 43% in 147 patients reported so far by World Health Organization (WHO).3 This rate is higher than that of SARS—estimated at 15%, and is strongly age- and sex-dependent.

Total fatalities: SARS 744 and MERS 842 (MERS continued for some years, at that).

In such cases, one can expect that carriers won't spread, in a geographic sense, very far or much. And, in fact, both SARS and MERS were 'easily' contained. That notion in the case of Covid-19 should have been blown out of the water with the New Rochelle 50-bagger.

Lewis Garbuz has given periodic social media updates about her husband, 50, who spent five days in a Westchester County hospital before he was diagnosed with coronavirus on March 2.

March 2 campers. Clearly he had instigated a long and far-reaching contagion. All other infectors would behave the same. Gad. It seems clear that he got infected in Manhattan where he worked. To no one's (with a working brain) surprise, NYC became and remains the epidemiological analog to the last scene in "Fail Safe".