the key phrase it would seem is “2 weeks to flatten the curve”
You may need to search back to March 2020.
But here is the Gates Foundation - John Hopkins - Global Corporatists cabal discussing how to do this shutdown last October 2019.
35 minutes
Event 201 Pandemic Exercise: Segment 2, Trade and Travel Discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkGNvWflCNM
March 30th (following the mid-march lockdown)
Coronavirus: When Will We Know if California Is Flattening the Curve?
KQED Science
Mar 30
Experts are telling us that staying home is the one way to “flatten the curve” of the number of COVID-19 cases and prevent an overload of hospitalizations. But when will we know if this massive change to our daily lives is having enough of an impact?
KQED’s Brian Watt spoke with Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, to find out. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.
How Well Are We Doing With Social Distancing and Is It Working?
I think we’re doing pretty well. In terms of—is it going to make a difference?—we’re going to have to wait and see. Right now really reflects what’s happened about two weeks ago. We’re going to have to wait a couple more weeks to really see how well this social distancing is working, or at least to get a preliminary idea....
It’ll go down as one of the tragedies in the United States that we so failed early in this pandemic to not test our population. If we don’t test a large number of people, it makes the data that we use more suspect....
... If we look at China, they started to plateau, and then started to decline, and that took place over around three weeks or so. So if we’re going to experience what China has seen, we would say that the surge starts to plateau, it could be, around three weeks or so...
If We Don’t See a Surge in Numbers, Would It Mean We Did Something Right?
Absolutely. I think that the major intervention that we have done in terms of prevention has been sheltering in place. There’s every reason to think it would work, both theoretically and we saw it — although it was draconian what the Chinese did — but we saw it worked in China as well. So I think that we can, and we should, anticipate that the sheltering-in-place will work, but it’s going to take a while for it to show up.
Why Do You Think Things Have Played Out So Differently in California and New York?
California instituted shelter in place five to seven days before New York did. And I know people are going to think, ‘Well, that’s not much.’ But in terms of how fast this virus is spreading through our population, it’s a lot of time.
New York has roughly about 28,000 people per square mile. San Francisco has about 17,000 people per square mile. The more dense the population is, the more opportunity virus has to spread. And once the virus spreads to a nonimmune person, on average, that person is going to spread it to about three more people. So you can see how quickly you get an exponential curve.