I mean the article explicitly lays out that their position is based on prior polio, smallpox and Spanish flu epidemics, so they aren’t dealing with the abstract. At all.
Otherwise, yes, it was absolutely abstract to them. Just because you're dealing with a real event or real data doesn't mean you're not dealing with it in the abstract. Humans react very differently when they're just thinking about something real hard and when they actually experience the thing directly.
https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/143206991839719424...