by kleinbl00
We know that Wuhan went from an index case in Nov-Dec 2019 to several thousand cases by mid-Jan 2020, thus going from initial seeding event to widespread local transmission in the span of 9-10 weeks. We now believe that the Seattle area seeding event was Jan 15 and we're now 7 weeks later. I expect Seattle now to look like Wuhan around 1 Jan, when they were reporting the first clusters of patients with unexplained viral pneumonia. We are currently estimating 600 infections in Seattle, this matches my phylodynamic estimate of the number of infections in Wuhan on Jan 1. Three weeks later, Wuhan had thousands of infections and was put on large-scale lock-down. However, these large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions to create social distancing had a huge impact on the resulting epidemic. China averted many millions of infections through these intervention measures and cases there have declined substantially.
So in other words, if we had a functioning national government Seattle would be in lockdown right now.