They are useful to know, but they have one fundamental problem: they erode trust. Though it is up for debate on how much trust in the political system and mass media there is left in the US.

Can you elaborate on how they (the anecdotes, I assume) erode trust?

I think part of the problem is that these sorts of anecdotes have been reported in previous bad flu years. That's perhaps a part of why people think it's just a bad flu. You can easily find reports (see above) where doctors describe their hospitals as "like the third world", needing tent wards, like war time, overloaded, people on beds in corridors etc from prior years. They sounded like a disaster had struck at the time too, because the media highlights the most dramatic anecdotes.

A bit like audio compression - if everything is compressed to the same volume then it gets really hard to tell how loud things are relative to each other.

Another problem is people encounter stories where there are anecdotes in the other direction e.g. today I read stories about Ticino, Japan, Germany where hospitals are waiting for an influx, but it doesn't seem to be growing in the expected way. Why? Unclear. These stories of course get less attention.

Simply: by telling lies. If we tell people 3 in 100 will die, and after the fact it turns out that 3 in 1000 died, next time, when it will be more serious nobody will believe.

So you are proposing the solution to not do anything so the projections become true, so next time you will take it serious?

The problem with your way of arguing is that one can not win. If they say "if we don't do anything there will be 3 in 100 people dying" and they do something, you say they lied. If they don't do anything, you will ask "why have they not done anything! They are incompetent or malicious"

> They are useful to know, but they have one fundamental problem: they erode trust. Though it is up for debate on how much trust in the political system and mass media there is left in the US.

Clickbait-style "everyone in New York is dead!" bad-faith hysteria would erode my trust.

"We saw a terrible situation, and communicated the situation as clearly as we could at the time, even though our information was incomplete. Since then we have more facts, and are striving to communicate them to you" enhances my trust, not erodes it.