This really doesn't track with even basic fact checking.

They didn't treat it like the Black Death; if anything, death estimates were way too low.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...

> The final toll currently "looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000" that U.S. officials previously estimated, Fauci said.

As for obesity and age, they were pretty clear on that:

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/fauci-offers-upda...

> "It’s so clear that the overwhelming weight of serious disease and mortality is on those who are elderly and those with a serious comorbidity: heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory difficulties," said Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

> "There will be outliers, as we’ve seen with influenza, [a person] who is young and healthy who winds up getting COVID-19, [gets] seriously ill and dies," Fauci said in a taped interview with Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "But if you look at the weight of the data the risk group is very, very clear."

You're getting mad at imaginary experts.

Or perhaps they just aren’t that good? Because they might have poopoo-ed the risks at one time, at another time they have also inflated the risks to the point of making people think a positive test is a death sentence.

In addition to flat out lying about that Chinese lab, of course.

Or, estimates are hard.

Any programmer knows “that should take a couple hours” may take just a few minutes or wind up taking days. We’ve all been there, despite being experts in our field.

At no point did I ever feel public health experts portrayed a COVID case as a death sentence. Much of the early uncertainty was whether the CFR was 1% versus 2% or so.

Oh yeah, when it’s time to put measures on other people, we’re all so absolutely sure how it’s necessary and how it’s going to work. Just trust the experts, they know what’s right!

But when it later turns out it didn’t work, well we can never be sure now can we?

I trust that experts in epidemiology have a better chance than I do, yes. Similarly, they should trust me on estimating software projects, even if I've been by no means perfect at it.

An interesting difference is that if I hire you and common sense tells me your estimate is impossible I’ll just not do business with you.

But even if common sense makes it clear that the ideas of these experts are unachievable and are never going to work, like the ‘covid 0’ plans and the ‘15 days to stop the spread’ plans, or the doomsday predictions that are clearly never going to come true, I can’t choose not to suffer the consequences.

These experts are a lot less than perfect. Some of them are more like politicians then like scientists. And the ones that are more like scientists frequently contradict each other, which is perfectly fine but should show people with common sense that it is not the brightest idea to blindly trust anything they say.