So what is the timeline from China about when they said "Houston we have a problem"? You don't believe they suppressed this information? And you're telling me that before this time, people weren't traveling to every international airport in the U.S. with this virus? That doesn't seem realistic to me. The virus didn't just wait until The communist party in China announced that it was spreading. So we had community spread well before the first known cases and well before the shut downs. Why didn't it load up the hospitals? maybe because the first contact was with mostly the young...flight attendants, baggage handlers, gate workers, and then on to their children who went off to school to spread it to more kids. Those kids spread it to their parents, who, by far, are mostly young, relatively speaking, hence not getting into the older, vulnerable, population. That didn't start happening until January/February. I would say that social distancing and virus awareness has helped mitigate the cases in the vulnerable, for sure. I would argue that it was too late to justify shutting down large sections of the economy, though. The good news here is that the infection curve apex precedes the death apex so that, if this theory is correct, we are quickly approaching herd immunity in many areas and new "bad" infections (i.e. cases) will start to level off and decrease rapidly in the next week or so. The deaths will still be steady for awhile as there are many vulnerable still at risk. But in the end, it won't look much different than a typical bad flu year and would certainly not have garnered as much political attention, if we had the data to prove it!
Now if my theory is wrong and it really only started showing up in the U.S. in mid to late January, why did it take so long to get here with no mitigation efforts in place at all? If it is hard to spread without any social distancing, why are we socially distancing now? This could be wrong if China didn't delay at all in their reporting the first initial human to human contact. But most agree that China and the WHO lied.
I wonder if we could run tests on the blood donations from November through December and see if the virus shows up. Maybe not if they do generic screens for pathogens and discard positives.