China didn’t announce that they had a problem virus until December 31st. And until late January they were telling everyone that it only passed animal to human when they knew that wasn’t remotely the case. It was extremely infectious.
Our first US case didn’t happen until January 21st.
Models are built on available data. The only hard data at the end of January was that Covid-19 is another SARS virus, that it was spreading so fast in China that factories weren’t reopening after Lunar New Year, and that Italy it was in serious trouble.
The 2003 SARS had a death rate of nearly 9%. We don’t remember it because it only infected some 8,000 worldwide and barely affected the US. 775 died.
By late February Covid-19, SARS-2, had infected 82,000 people with an unknown death rate. Maybe it would be as high as the first SARS. No one knew. Wuxan, much bigger that NYC, was totally shut down and authorities were welding shut the exits of large apartment towers. China refused to let our virus hunters in to get a close look. In Italy their hospitals were overwhelmed and on the verge of collapse.
That was the situation when the CDC had to make estimates of how many could be killed by it. They didn’t have the luxury of two months of hindsight data available to the current armchair critics calling for their heads.
I see that yesterday the projected total death count was raised to almost 69,000 in the IHME model. Last time before that I looked at it it was under 62,000. Who knows where we’ll actually end up.
You mean the first IDENTIFIED case after the virus was named.......
I suspect the virus was creeping into this country as early as November, maybe even October and all the people who thought they had colds or pneumonia actually had the virus......
It should be easy enough to find out, just test the individuals who were sick back in October, November and December for the virus antibodies........