I was reading through some old (you know, March) articles about the virus, about when Italy had locked down the North up to about when New York City locked down. In a way it's surprising how fast "we" reacted. Not defending the too slow and too little reactions in most places, but the perfectly sensible fear to some degree was greater than the actual number of infections. New York State went on lockdown on March 20, when there were "only" about 10,000 cases and 50 deaths. Obviously the extreme and sudden growth rate in measured cases should have put people on notice, especially given the situation in other countries, but while panic was fully appropriate I'm actually a bit surprised "we" did. Again, I don't mean this as a defense of the many many bad decisions that were made (or were not made), but it could have very easily been much, much worse.
But the other point is that justifiable panic set in when things weren't yet quite so bad, and now they're REALLY BAD (in absolute numbers if not yet NYC growth rate in March bad) and, well...
