I did my numbers back in December. In January was already pretty worried, but I'm not an expert I thought. Maybe there's something I'm not taking in account.
So I kept reading about models and stats. Not that difficult. Ran my numbers again and again, yep it seemed pretty bad no matter what I cheated myself with parameters etc.
Then it came to Spain. I was pretty nervous by that time, kept it cool, tried to warn to people that this was no joke, everyone thought that I was a bit crazy and alarmist. Days passed, government went absolutely erratic and irreposible, lost all my trust in the lead epidemiologist and the ministry of Healthcare, not to mention the HUGE amount of healthcare workers that were insisting that it was just a flu and some of us were alarmists for two month and turned 360 in a few days.
Too late. Now I'm in it.
I have to say that some time ago I had a course of applied statistics with epidemiology exercises so I was not really an alien to it, but not an expert either.
It's also not necessarily an indictment of democracy- Taiwan clearly has been on the ball here. But it is absolutely an indictment of our current state of affairs in many western countries.