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.