It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I understood exponential growth at that point to know that, because it wasn't being contained (no measures with a reasonable chance of containment were being taken at exactly the time when they really had to be taken), there was no stopping the exponential growth in the near term in the US. And especially once it was spreading in Italy, there was just not a credible reason to say "it cannot happen here." You should mistrust people's judgement in the future on similar such topics if they were dismissive of the possibility of this happening.

You should update your Bayesian priors about the credibility and judgement of those people on topics such as this. And that IS constructive.

Doesn't mean that those people are useless, but unless you've seen a mea culpa from them, you should look warily on future such predictions. You should note to yourself "this person may be prone to downplaying some risks and interpreting things over-optimistically, with some amount of wishful thinking."

To be clear, these people have no credibility with me already - but your confidence in hindsight as to the obviousness of the current predicament in late Feb/early March is not one I share.

It was clear to me around February 20-22nd or so that we had a significant chance of a Wuhan-like situation. I put my money where my mouth was by going to the store and buying (a single but large container of) hand sanitizer and non-perishable food at that time (I didn’t hoard, but did buy ahead of time... before everyone else, thus giving the logistics system time to restock for everyone else). It’s not mere hindsight.

Good for you - but it wasn't to me, and I'm not daft; neither was it clear to the leaders of most countries (going by their actions), and I'm sure many other people - including those criticised in the original blog post.

There are two valid points in there, despite how easy a target "the media" is.

- People saying things with confidence that they didn't know to be true

- This happens all the time but with Coronavirus, the facts came to light within days of them saying this

I get what Paul Graham is saying here.

Agree, but it's all pretty obvious the first point. It's what they are paid to do. There's no insight there and no credit for originality in writing an article pointing that out.

I'd be more impressed if he proposed a workable mechanism for actually holding them to account.

Italy was in full lockdown on the 9th of March, and half the country on the 8th. And a lot of politicians were still downplaying the virus after that.

No, I believe that's obvious, that people with good sense already know these paid opinion-shouters are to be taken with a pinch of salt at best, and that it doesn't help to attack them on a point at which (for once), they might be given some leeway for lacking insight.