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>>As far as I am aware...

Doesn't really matter what you are aware or not. USA and the major countries have thousands of people that do just that, monitor epidemics. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/index.html That's their job and they have ways to notify leadership. Other look out for steroids, others for hackers hacking power plants, others look out for terror threats and so on.

It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January but civilian leader more or less ignored it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intellig...



> It turns out that out intel services knew about this and its potential since January

I would hope they knew about it since January because I knew about it since January and likely so did you.

And since the beginning of February I've been warning people in ever more concrete terms.

Here it was, right here on HN in January:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146446

There may be even older ones, for instance, this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22000761

Which linked to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51047576

which in turn links to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025

Which is the oldest western article I've been able to find. Are there older ones?


On HN, the oldest I was able to find is

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926713

linking to

https://www.dw.com/en/china-investigates-sars-like-virus-as-...

from Jan 1st, which is 8 days earlier than your second link, but with only 3 points and zero comments, I'm not sure how much that counts.

The BBC story that you linked to is from Jan 3rd, the AP had a story[1] on the 5th, so the public had opportunity to know about it in early January. I can't get Reddit's search to cooperate, so I can't say if there's an earlier mention there (plus Google's dates about Reddit don't agree with Reddit's). Wikipedia has an early timeline page with a lot of details.[2] Public statements were made on December 30th about pneumonia of unknown cause.

If there had been a US pandemic response team, we could have started mobilizing December 30th. Hong Kong did.

[1] https://apnews.com/7cfe53b9e7c7509c1f61c6c09e6fc4e6 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...


That DW article is pretty poor, dating sars 1 to around 2009/2010 - confusing it with swine flu perhaps? A later comment, presumably from another source since the article is tagged AFP/AP/Reuters, gives a correct and more precise dating to sars 1. Yet the editor/collator didn't notice the discrepancy.


Excellent sleuthing, so even earlier.




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