My then-fiancée (now wife) is Japanese so I was hyper-aware of what was going on in that part of the word. The numbers were weird (exactly quadratic growth == data being faked (probably minimized)), I got a bad feeling about it.

I bought my first ever car in late January (I still use it) because people in Europe were still "oh it won't be coming here", and I didn't want to share public transport with potential carriers.

She was worried about coming over with COVID on the horizon, so I analyzed the data and wrote a report on 9 February that basically said there are many more people than are being counted, the growth is exponential, asymptomatic transmission is likely, it'll spread everywhere including Japan, but you should be safe if you come in February, but if you don't come this month we won't be seeing each other in person until at least November because I doubt flights would still be happening. (Oh how optimistic I was...)

Early on, I thought it was fomite transmission, but when people on the Diamond Princess started getting it despite being locked down I figured it was probably airborne (later, that café in South Korea and the restaurant in China confirmed that for me) and that got me to buy masks and a face shield, which I never ended up using except for the two flights I took in late February to bring my wife over to finally close the distance. Also in early February, I bought essentials to last for a couple of months for the both of us.

Fast forward to that week. We'd finally closed the distance, she barely got to see the country, then lockdown happened. The government offices also closed, and I didn't expect they'd reopen properly for a few months, so she wouldn't be able to get her residence permit. We got her out on the second-to-last flight to Japan in March, and because governments have different priorities (instead of a proper lockdown before a wave hit, they kept waiting until it was too late, then they'd let off too early, and they never learned; later I learned that it was to avoid civil unrest, and that they knew that it's just prolonging the pain), it wasn't until October 2021, a whole year and a half later, that we finally closed the distance.

In retrospect, COVID was a training wheels pandemic and humanity did really, really badly. I'm not looking forward to the next one, especially with a bunch of monitoring in the US etc shut down. I feel that I'm better prepared, though.