Public health experts all over the world have predicted the magnitude of this sort of thing for decades, and this particular virus for months.

We have plenty of historical examples of pandemics to reference.

Hell, Bill Gates himself gave a TED talk in 2015 about exactly this: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-warned-us-covid-19-...

> “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates said during the Ted Talk. “Not missiles, but microbes.”

That reminds me of all of the finance experts that have been predicting a major asset bubble pop for the last 7 years.

Anyone who was paying attention to what was going on at ground-level in China in January could see this coming. It's the lack of testing at that time up through February that caused us (speaking as someone from the U.S.) to follow Italy's trajectory (or worse) rather than South Korea's.

And no one is disparaging those at the front lines who are doing their best to mitigate this very very bad situation.

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6824-2019-10-key-fin...

> In the exercise scenario, forcasting gives a 90% change that the pandemic will be of very high severity, with 110 million forecasted illnesses, 7.7 million forecasted hospitalizations, and 586,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.

> During the exercise, a significant topic of concern centered around the inadequaces of existing executive branch and statutory authorities to provide HHS with the requisite mechanisms to serve successfully as the lead federal agency in response to an influenza pandemic.

People did predict the magnitude of this, and it was ignored, repeatedly, which is why it got out of control in the first place.