They kinda need to be right every time?

Why are chickens so scared of everything?

It is because if they miss the fox a single time they are dead.

If they run away 999 times without needing to, it's no big deal. Making a lot of noise so other chickens run away too helps the herd.

You can laugh at the chickens, but the chickens you laugh at, are the kind of animals who survives.

The same are true for wolves: they run away from humans because they are too great a risk of injury compared to the size of the meal.

If you aren't willing to run away when not absolutely required, you will miss the one time you really needed to.

Except that humans are much less binary than fight or flight and capable of nuanced reactions so the entire comparison is baloney.

There is a cost to living in a constant state of fear and preparation, the opportunity costs are massive.

In many aspects humans are more capable, but not all.

Humans don't have to look at an animal for a few days to figure out if it's a mouse or a fox.

But for people infected with the Coronavirus we are not more capable: the first 2-14 days a person is infected with the Coronavirus we cannot see it. Only medical tests can, and we can't test everybody around us.

So the smartest might be to run away 100 times to avoid the single person who is infected.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...

Or just wash your hands ...

Tell that to the person who sat opposite of the Iranian under minister for public health while interviewing him and he was coughing all over the place. Fortunately she sat about 2 meters away from him, but still, I'd be concerned. Washing your hands and not touching your face certainly helps. But elevators, air travel, the subway, the tram, the bus, the train, places of work and events all pretty much guarantee spread of viruses all the time. This virus is no exception, it will spread. The question is how fast it will spread and how much we can do to limit that so that the health care system has time to absorb the impact. Washing hands helps.

I guess it defines on what you mean by getting it right. If you mean correctly predicting the specific disease that becomes a pandemic, then sure. If you mean being alive at the end of it, then I don't think it's so bad to have a high false positive rate as long as your false negative rate is low given how enormously asymmetric the costs of a false negative are relative to a false positive.