You said it yourself, we were lacking the data which in a fat tailed event like a pandemic means that you should be as careful as possible.
It boggles my mind that people don't understand how to act under uncertainty.
It boggles my mind that people don't understand how to act under uncertainty.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”
-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration
"So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating?" Of course we do in case of a pandemic, since we are dealing with a completely different underlying distribution of effects.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...
Contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening and border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances."