Seismologists suspect earthquake on San Andreas Fault is imminent

It is, but it's not "the real pandemic". As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.

The immediately available silly reaction linked from there is all the articles about how actually the flu was a more real threat, but the one I originally referenced was on social media.

> The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet.

You should assume a respiratory virus is airborne. Western public health people had two big problems; one being they were stuck on the last battle and couldn't ever admit anything was airborne because norovirus, HIV, etc weren't, and the other being that leaders were only capable of saying things that sounded leader-y and social media people were only capable of saying things that sounded progressive, and neither of them were interested in if those things were true. So the leaders went to lying about face masks not being effective because they thought it would reduce panic somehow, and the social media people went to telling people not to be racist.

> What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?

Yes, because that's what China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan did, and they were closer to the action.

> Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks).

The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.

It was in China. You could see it.

> The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it

Only two of them. Japan and Korea weren't - Japanese people wear face masks mostly because of pollen allergies.

> and they have a more community/society bent than the western world.

I listed four completely different countries. (Also, IME Japanese people are actually more individualistic than Americans. Though they pretend they aren't.)

> They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health.

Japan's policies involved no such thing, in fact they have fewer legal powers than US public health officers do and explicitly said this was the reason they didn't do several things we did. Nevertheless, they were both successful and reversed policies a lot less often than we did. It mostly involved discouraging large crowds indoors ("C3") but not what you'd call "lockdown".

> Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?

We don't need to construct a cause, since you do that to predict an outcome, but we could already observe different outcomes from the different growth rate.

I thought of mentioning Castle Bravo or Tsar Bomba as contray examples of my general argument, but I simply stated "normal nuke". Neither Bravo or Tsar were at all normal nukes and especially by modern design standards that focus more on the multi-kiloton range and precision-guided multiple strikes against a given area target.

Even with those insanely giant old bombs, I wouldn't absolutely be sure that they'd achieve a massive tension release, even in a fault as tense as the San Andreas. Such a thing is likely just a bit too variable-prone to model effectively.

As for something like a Hiroshima type bomb doing it, bloody unlikely. The original post comment simply mentioned a bomb so I didn't want to stray into the biggest mega explosives of human military history.