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No, firefighting is not trivial from a decision making perspective. Deluges cause severe water damage, even in the best circumstances where they ultimately save the day. Firebreaks have a moderate failure rate and can even help propagate fire if the wind is wrong. Backfires literally fight fire with fire. They all involve heavy tradeoffs and severe uncertainty, but as a culture we accept that these are necessary aspects of firefighting, and that even with such inherent uncertainty we want timely action rather than "wait forever and see."

It's actually a good analogy, it just points to exactly the opposite conclusion from the one you drew.

> Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives?

Yes, the CDC models out pandemic responses in advance between panedmics. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm

One obvious weakness of the options they have to do this is they're preparing for diseases we've seen, not novel diseases we haven't seen yet. But in the case of COVID-19, it's an airborne pathogen so the flu containment protocol was the best tool in the toolbox. Masks, hand-washing, and lockdowns didn't come out of a vacuum; they're part of the standard process (which most people perhaps didn't know because unlike, say, fire-fighting, we don't have regular TV shows about pandemics).

>That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled.

For this specific fire though? /s

COVID isn't the first Virus in the world. There is a good quantity of science on combatting viruses. Sure, we need to figure out where COVID falls in our overall knowledge of viruses but claiming "They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction." is far from the actual situation.

There are very few things settled in the science of fire, but that's beside the point.

I'd say the science is settled on what the most effective thing was to eliminate COVID: complete and total shut down, as soon as possible: New Zealand has the lowest casualties of any OECD country and held sporting events in full stadiums when the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper.

Unfortunately at a global level it's not possible or practical for every country to have total and complete shut down. I'm thinking of the majority of the world's population who live in developing countries.

Thus as a strategy it's not really a sustainable one at all, but can work at a small level for a short time.

Yet another reason not to conflate the science of a pandemic with actually fighting it!

So you think the US should have completely shut down their borders?

I'm gonna guess that would have been immediately labeled as racist if Trump even suggested that. Oh... wait he did and immediately got labeled racist.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5...

"Trump clearly sees the novel coronavirus as just another foreign invader to keep out — a viewpoint reflected both in his policy proposals and the way he and his administration talk about the virus. This approach is in line with his overarching political strategy of exploiting Americans’ fears to justify racist, nativist policies."

> That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently.

That is not quite true. Where science is not available firefighters go by experience and best guesses. The same goes for cops and even doctors.

Not everything we do has good science behind it. Instead, science is coming pretty often much later, simply because actual science takes a lot of time.

Then why am I told to "trust the science" for every lock-down measure put in place?

You're being pedantic. I was just using a metaphor to explain we have a lot more data for one thing and it's pretty clear what path needs to be taken in a fire. Yeah it's not 100% but it's much further along than COVID "science".

The problem with that metaphor was that real life firefighters don't work like that. And it breaks that metaphors.