Answer: The Administration (including Congress), Academia, and the Media
See CoronaGeddon: Words of the Pandemic You Need to Know
See The Coronavirus Calendar Here
The potential for a global pandemic of historic proportions was in plain sight for the administration, academia, and the global media to see in January and February.
Back in January, the Global Language Monitor, the data research company, created a data model of the expansion of the newly discovered n-coronavirus in Wuhan, China. (You can see this on the LanguageMonitor (dot) com site.)
The numbers were truly frightening, so frightening that I decided not to publish my findings until I could find a respected research study that mirrored my numbers and projections. I found one, published in The Lancet medical journal in the UK, that used data from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUS&T). The Lancet created a number of graphics that illustrated the impending nightmare that you can see on our site.
The key to HKS&T’s data is that it assumes a much larger base to start from (rather than China’s official count). I then created the Coronavirus Calendar that I published about six or seven weeks ago, the main point of which was that the virus doubles every six days or so, with an infection rate of 2.63 with a mortality rate of about .02. (The mortality rate has been a bit lower over the last few weeks but is actually higher in Iran and Italy.) GLM distributed this study to the worldwide media.
Update: China Did Not Count 43,000 Asymptomatic Cases
Though I created the Coronavirus Calendar, I am still shocked at how quickly it is moving. (For California, that’s 39 million * .6 * .02%.) If you extrapolate these numbers for your community, state, region or nation, you can see the horrifying conclusions.
This is not to say, of course, that this result is inevitable. There is still much that can be done by the concerted efforts of the global institutions — and the very real fact that many pandemics in the past have actually burned themselves out.
Paul JJ Payack
President
The Global Language Monitor
Austin, Texas
