>a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction

This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.

Have you thought about inverting your thinking? Every pandemic this century ended up being a damp squib despite WHO et al promising doomsday.

Did they end up being a "damp squib", or were corrective and protective measures implemented to slow them sufficiently so as to control them before they became endemic?

It may be that when the Boy Cried Wolf, the wolf didn't show up precisely because the villagers had turned out with torches and successfully scared it away, unseen.

Damp squib

And your rationale for that characterization is...?

The WHO predicted that 150 million people would be killed by avian flu [1]. Nothing happened. They predicted 750,000 people would die in the UK, it was more like 200. For swine flu it was minimum possible deaths of 11k but up to 70k. It was more like 400. They got upset when people wouldn't use their case fatality rates which turned out very wrong. Over half a million people died of flu related deaths last year. Don't recall reading a single news article about it

1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/emergency....

2, https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract

He is all over these threads downplaying the seriousness of this virus, best to just ignore him.

I'm aware. That's why I responded to him. Because it's better to confront this kind of mendacity.

Was it the WHO promising doomsday? Or the media reporting on it?

The WHO

>a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction.

Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work.

This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.

Places like Singapore and Taiwan have had successful responses and the locals seem happy with them. The US response re testing is just awful. (I've just read the NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...)

I think you're right, and that economic damage is something I think too many people are worried about. I've seen a lot of business magazines more worried about the dow-jones than the number of people who could die.