Ya know, I could have sworn I remember reading a little bit about COVID in Nov of 2019, but my recollection doesn’t line up with the Wikipedia timeline. I remember being nervous around campus at the time… although there were some other pretty bad colds going around that year, so maybe I just got mixed up.
I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?
Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.
Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.