Pandemic Apprentice: The Office Edition

EARLY INTELLIGENCE TIMELINE ON COVID-19

December 31, 2019: Known that only 15 cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology had been identified to be associated with Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market, with no fatalities, but it had already become international news.

January 10, 2020: First reported COVID-19 fatality, and even at that time, Chinese medical authorities had no evidence that the disease was being transmitted from person to person.

January 20, 2020: A study commissioned by the WHO had determined that South Korea, the closest geographic enemy of the People's Republic of China, was the 17th top destination from Wuhan Airport, but by February, Daegu, the location of the first active duty military infection, was the hottest hot spot in South Korea.

January 24, 2020: CNN published a story regarding a possible zoonotic source for the novel coronavirus: Chinese krait or king cobra, but any microbiologist or virologist knows that coronaviruses infect only mammals and birds, not reptiles.

February 24, 2020: The largest sample size trace contact study performed before the pandemic declaration had specifically found a secondary attack rate ranging between 0.9% and 4.8%, 12 times too low to be described as "highly contagious", and, hence, be capable of setting off a super spreader event, as was repeatedly alleged to have occurred, in a disease that presented a consistent pattern of clustered outbreaks with no wider community spread.

Yet, even by April 2020, Dr. Ralph Northam, a former U.S. Army surgeon, conceded that at no time did he ever, in an abundance of caution, conduct a review to determine whether the novel coronavirus had been cultivated or manipulated in a laboratory, and that he had never considered the possibility that even a highly contagious disease might have been weaponized.