First case in December 2019. February 2, 2020 fogging machines on city streets in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdwCdyiDCw

We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.

January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.

Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472

2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.

The first ive heard of it was a wave of sickleave traversing through the machine integrator community ,many of them travelling back from the coast. Oh and then adv china.

Nov sounds early but I was in China in oct-dec '19 and jan '20 and then it was definitely talked about a lot going to feb when I left (luckily and completely coincidental). I had to go on another business trip right after and returned, again completely coincidental (I was an idiot in hindsight), just 2 days before my country fully locked down. On that last trip I contracted covid which gave me an annoying couch.

Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.

Dec 2019 is when I first read something on reddit about it, I remember thinking "oh, SARS is coming back".

I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).

Probably not block CDC scientists of speaking about it[0]. Also not interfere with data collection by the CDC[1].

They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.

There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].

[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/trump-ad...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

[3] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-homeland...

[5] https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...

The premise here is that there would've been one. It is vaguely possible that since a Democrat wouldn't have defunded the US presence in the region, that it could've been contained. Not plausible really, but possible. That scenario would not have been (and was not) possible with the decisions that Republicans took in the lead up to the pandemic.

Cases were happening in China around Dec ‘19 and I was worried. Then a case in the US followed by “no reason to worry”. Then it spiraled.

This is pretty clearly a joke: "Really, I don't really wash my hands ever. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they not real. I can't get sick."

https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1856494554624442433