@LanceEllisor Thank you for approaching this question with kindness rather than antagonism. I don't feel we're out of the woods yet for avoiding a healthcare crush (especially considering recent instability), but happy to comment on why this didn't hit as early as it could have.
@LanceEllisor The key thing that changed between March 6 and today is... everything. When I wrote this thread, it was meant to illustrate why America needed to wake up to what was coming. On March 6, there was virtually no discussion of this at all, much less any intervention happening. 
@LanceEllisor Key line in original thread: "In absence of extreme intervention, rate of spread is unlikely to slow until reaching >1% of population." I'd call the stay-home orders we've been under extreme. Warranted, but extreme. Now they feel normalized, but this is totally unprecedented.
@LanceEllisor On March 6, we were still two weeks out from even the first state's shut-down.
@LanceEllisor March 6 was before the NBA canceled their season, before Tom Hanks announced he was Covid-positive, before the White House daily briefings, before any of the signaling events that marked the first signs of the country recognizing this as a serious threat & responding in kind.
@LanceEllisor March 6 was even before the reports emerged from Italy that they were, indeed, experiencing precisely this sort of healthcare system crush. Those stories started reaching U.S. press on about March 12-13. And it didn't start happening in NYC until several weeks after that.
@LanceEllisor I've been incredibly relieved to see that in the ensuing weeks, people really did take this threat seriously and buckle down. It has worked, for the time being. And only because actions that are *precisely* the sort of "extreme" actions required, have been taken.
@LanceEllisor But I'm still nervous about the next few months. People are losing patience & losing their cushion of financial reserves, if they even had one, to tolerate these measures. We still haven't instituted testing, tracing, & isolating protocols that we should have while buying time.
