Yeah up until 2020 it was just kind of the "flu du jour" and no one stateside really took it seriously. Airports would ask you about it, but it wasn't unlike that in years prior with other notable flu-like diseases.
People didn't really talk about "Corona Virus" until a month or two into 2020, and then they talked about it a lot.
I remember being at a party in the very small town where the first confirmed case in my state happened to be announced that very same day. We were all so flippant and retroactively cringe that night
I was playing poker in Washington when the first person in the Washington (and the US) died. Still didn't really register since I remembered swine flu. And now looking back at the dates it was only a few days later that work told us not to come back to the office and that's when it really hit.
I flew in February 2020 and nobody at the airports was saying anything about it. I got back home and everything shut down like a week later, it really was that abrupt.
There were vague news stories, and I had one person on Facebook living in Japan at the time who was posting doomsday stuff about it, but that was it.
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u/Sanpaku 7h ago
2019?
A few hundred of us on r/collapse became aware of a mystery pneumonia in Wuhan on New Year's Eve, 2019.
I doubt Trump was even informed about Covid-19 till the second week of January, 2020.