Maggie's Farm

People are unable to get their heads around something new, and so try to fit C19 into previous categories, which they may or may not understand very well. This is why they keep reverting to comparing it to the seasonal flu, which the article at Gateway seems unable to refrain from doing also. No matter how much information is put out that this is something different, people keep defaulting to "oh, but we have more deaths from the flu than we do from C19 to date," which is irrelevant, but I sort of understand it. It's a disease, so it's at least conceptually closer than car accidents, gun deaths, heart attacks, or suicides.

The low death totals are also taken as evidence that we didn't need to take all these preventative measures, which is similar to saying that you bought an umbrella and didn't get wet in the rain, so obviously you wasted that money.

Thirdly, there is a growing focus because provisional "models" were not fully accurate or were even quite inaccurate, as if this somehow invalidates all actions by everyone who took a look at them. Trump didn't need a "model" to forbid flights from China, and then elsewhere, other than in a very general sense that it would discourage spread of infection. We encourage handwashing, masks, and distance because we know all those things reduce the spread of infection, though we don't know how much each. Waiting until there is a "model" that commenters on Maggie's all agree is valid is absurd. We go forward with the best we have and adjust as we go.

I acknowledge that some model, however vague, is implied when people make decisions. But to claim that it's "all just made up" is just a freshman's argument , and these days used only to insist that the economic restrictions were unnecessary and yelling at everyone else for not listening. Which is also, BTW, based on an implied model, just not an acknowledged one.