On Friday, Tom Maguire kindly credited me for being “prescient on the emerging coronavirus threat” after looking through the Twitter accounts of major news reporters in January and February, and seeing who was even talking about the virus before it became day-in, day-out big news. As much as I would like to claim all-seeing clairvoyance, you know that’s not true. If that were the case, I would have made a lot of money betting against the Jets.
That said, by January 31, I tweeted out a gif of the X-Files’ Dana Scully warning about “the advent of a global contagion.” On February 11, I wrote, “what’s going on with the coronavirus is significantly more important than the political squabble of the day.” By Valentine’s Day, I was writing, “Feel free to come back and tell me I’m wrong at the end of the year, but I think that if the presidential race is the No. 1 story of 2020, then No. 1A will be the coronavirus. Yes, we’ve been through H1N1 and swine flu and various other outbreaks that came and went without having a significant impact on the life of the average American. This is different.”
My true “what the hell is going on?” moment came sometime in the first week of February, when I ran across this video of authorities in Wuhan spraying some sort of sterilizing gas — bleach? — through the streets of the city from trucks and motorcycles. It’s a surreal sight, like something out of a science-fiction movie.
But even if that just was some sort of wacky Rube Goldberg-style disinfection effort, on February 10, the Chinese government put its two biggest cities, Beijing and Shanghai, on partial lockdown — check points to measure people’s body temperatures, compulsory mask-wearing, travel restrictions, requiring all visitors to check with medical authorities upon arrival.
On February 11, I wrote, “Maybe this is just a paranoid and authoritarian regime reacting the way paranoid and authoritarian regimes do. Or maybe the Chinese government is genuinely freaked out. Maybe they’ve found good reasons to be genuinely freaked out.”
I’m just some schmo, but even I know that authoritarian regimes don’t like admitting they have problems. This is why North Korea, stuck between China and South Korea, insists it has zero coronavirus cases, and why various sources think the number of cases in Iran is anywhere from two to ten times the official figures, and why Australia, Great Britain, and France have expressed doubts about China’s current numbers.
Authoritarian regimes don’t like shutting down massive, economy-driving cities like Shanghai and Beijing, unless they absolutely have to, and unless the consequences of keeping those cities open and operating would be even worse than a shutdown.
If I could see that . . . how many people in the U.S. government could have reasonably been expected to see that and draw that conclusion?