Relate to a lot of this (and it's especially worth noting there is something about identity contempt especially on social media but also IRL that hobbles our ability to coordinate understanding and action) but... let's also not forget it wasn't only contrarians and autodidacts who were making concerned noises -- there are plenty of professional epidemiologists and other specialists who were beating the warning drums.
Exactly. For example, back on February 3 we had this from Harvard epidemiologists:
> “Many epidemiologists and people who are following this outbreak closely are assuming that it’s probably quite a bit more widespread than the case counts suggest,” said Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Many people also think that there’s probably over 100,000 in reality out in mainland China, for example. We just don’t capture all of those through the case reporting we have. … We can assume that this is growing at somewhat of an exponential rate, and it will continue increasing in scale.”
