People tend to think that high intelligence or expertise in a particular field makes one's opinions carry more weight, but that is, perhaps unfortunately, often not the case.
A few days after Joshua Bach posted the above critique, the original "flatten the curve" blogger, Thomas Pueyo, basically echoed Bach's points and called it "the hammer and the dance."
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...
The damage and confusion done by Pueyo's original graph is moot at this point, but it's been interesting to see how the FTC phrase has lived on.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1340/1*PZesaMfoPxgYJBoQVtpmjQ.gi...
We have to have a vaccine first!
Treating our populations like a herd means that the ones most susceptible die... by the millions. When I hear the term thrown about like this I can't help thinking of armchair quarterbacks.
We really don't want a policy saying get everyone together and let the ones that can't hack it die, then declare success. That's awful.
Clearly, whatever field you are an expert in, it isn't epidemiology, and and its unfortunately not the case that your expertise in whatever has given your opinions in disease control any more weight.
Yes I was mistaken about where he died, and can't edit the post because it was too heavily down-voted. The point stands that the graph posted by Tao has cost lives.