Truth to tell, I probably owe it to the San Francisco 49ers.
Before last NFL season, I bet SF at 40-1 and 20-1 to win the NFC. The 40-1 was an offshore book, but the 20-1 was in Las Vegas. Since I also wanted to scout March Madness futures in Las Vegas, I started planning a trip from Tennessee to Nevada as soon as the 49ers had won the NFC on January 19th.
I was aware of what had been reported from Wuhan, and I knew that physicians there were being muzzled. I was familiar enough with some of the pandemic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, to be concerned. I originally planned to fly to Las Vegas the first week in February. When I realized I'd be arriving in the middle of Chinese New Year, I vetoed the idea. Las Vegas is the top international travel destination during Chinese New Year. I did not want to deal with that at all. So I rescheduled for the last week in February, with an LV arrival late on the 24th.
For the next month, I followed the international news, trying to ascertain how dangerous things were likely to get for me. When virus numbers exponentially exploded in Iran and Italy, I figured that the virus either had to be airborne or asymptomatically transmitted. Cases in the U.S. were minimal at the time, but I was sure it was lurking. For me, traveling to Las Vegas became a matter of dodging raindrops before it became a torrential downpour.
I booked a one-way flight from Charlotte to Las Vegas, and drove a rental the 150 miles to Charlotte rather than spend extra time in the local airport. I wore gloves but no mask in the Charlotte airport, based on the incorrect CDC recommendations at the time. While in the airport, I tried to envision how you could protect yourself in an airport milieu. I had no answers. Airports seemed indefensible, the worst of all environments other than hospitals. All of the shared air, security lines, luggage and personal effects sharing plastic trays and conveyor belts with every other person's stuff -- it was a disaster incubator. I saw one person in the Charlotte airport wearing a mask, and nobody else with gloves.
While in Las Vegas, I kept to myself and stayed in my room when I wasn't actually pounding the bricks. I did make one large error -- I stood in a buffet line once at the Orleans casino. I realized while standing there for my comped $20 buffet that I was a complete and utter idiot. "Mitigation" and "flattening the curve" were not yet common parlance, but anyone paying attention to international news had no business standing in a buffet line.
When I flew back, it was a one-way to Nashville, where I again rented a car and drove the 270 miles home. Working through the details of the trip forced me to insert the virus into my travel plans each step of the way. I had spent a month evaluating overseas news reports and watching videos of South Korean infectious disease specialists who were coping with the virus. The logistics of the trip had forced me to educate myself.
Fox Was Not Your Friend
Understanding that President Trump was blowing smoke during February wasn't hard if you paid attention to the rest of the world. Pandemics have happened in the past, and it did not require a crystal ball to understand what was coming.
I pity the folks who relied on Fox News during those February weeks. They would have had no inkling of the reality headed their way. "Parochial" is the best word for Fox News viewers. They are locked into such a limited source of information that they have no idea they're in an echo chamber.
Summary
I got almost everything about this pandemic correct. I made some personal risk errors (the lack of a mask early and the buffet line), but the blog itself has been pristinely accurate and occasionally prescient. If you go back, read the entries, and synch them up with media reports, I was routinely 24-48 hours, and sometimes weeks, ahead of the news cycles.
But this was not rocket science. Anyone could have been as in-the-know. All it required was a respect for science, an awareness of who was actually expert, an understanding that the United States is not protected from the virus by manifest destiny, and a healthy disregard for Fox News.
Bob Dietz
March 6, 2020
