I think it's time to find employment elsewhere if there is any.
There isn't any.
It doesn't seem like any of our elected officials "get it", but another couple weeks of all these businesses shut down (or worse, more of the lockdowns like Cali, NY, IL), and there's going to be millions or TENS of MILLIONS of people without jobs, a majority of which don't have an emergency fund big enough for expenses (a.k.a. food and shelter) a few weeks/months long.
If/when it gets to that point, the reaction to this virus is going to kill many, many times more people than the virus itself will.
James, I had the exact same symptoms. Started Feb 18th, I didn't get over my cough and chest tightness until the first of last week. I told my wife I hadn’t been that sick since I was jr high when I came down with the flu. I also tested negative for the flu. I agree with Chris, it’s been here since December IMO.
I've never been one for conspiracy theories, still am not. But I absolutely believe that this thing has been around for many weeks, if not months, longer than "they" think it has.
I read an article a day or two back looking at some of the math / statistics of the early stages of the outbreak in both China and the US. In both cases, it was several weeks after the first cases were confirmed before the government stepped in and started strictly quarantining / isolating the infected. If the virus is anywhere near as contagious as the experts say it is, then, at the absolute minimum, if would have spread to hundreds of thousands of people during that time period. Since the "official" number of cases during that time only went up by a few hundred, then this can only mean two things:
1. It's not actually as contagious as we're being told.
2. The number of people that have it now are at least an order of magnitude or two higher than the official count.
I think it's a combo of the two, with a tendency towards there currently being millions of people that have it / had it.
The Diamond Princess situation reinforces this as well. A small handful of people got on the ship already infected (unknowingly), and they quickly (within a week) spread it to roughly 20% of the total passengers on the ship (~700 out of ~3700). If it spread at even a tenth of that rate here on the mainland once it arrived (assuming the first documented case was actually the first case), it would have spread to millions of people by now, bare minimum.
That's not to make light of the virus; it's definitely a very serious new threat to older and/or sicker people. Measures should be implemented to try and protect those people. But if there really are millions of people that have this virus already, then that means the death rate decreases by a factor of 10 or 100. And if that's true, then all of this "shut-everything-down" nonsense needs to stop, and it needs to stop soon.