I'm not saying someone should throw a model with 100 parameters and say it's the truth. But you could incrementally build up a model for questions like "should we close schools and when", refining it step by step and getting a range of outcomes, a probability distribution. Sure, the precision is still limited, but it's much, much better than how the discussion looks today: "oh, our government decided to close all schools for the next two weeks, I guess that buys us a couple of days, so we're maybe no longer 3 weeks behind Italy, but 4". Because that's the level of the discussion on the smarter end.
My point is: we have the tooling necessary to talk about this problem better, more accurately, more precisely, in real-time, and to cover more angles simultaneously - which would lead to better decisions. But we're not using it. At least not publicly.
(This is a part of a general issue of mine, that we absolutely suck at having any kind of data-based discussion; best what we do is exchange badly made charts and context-free data points. We should be exchanging and discussing whole dynamic models. But I suppose this wider issue can wait until we're done with the coronavirus mess.)
My point is: we have the tooling necessary to talk about this problem better, more accurately, more precisely, in real-time, and to cover more angles simultaneously - which would lead to better decisions. But we're not using it. At least not publicly.
(This is a part of a general issue of mine, that we absolutely suck at having any kind of data-based discussion; best what we do is exchange badly made charts and context-free data points. We should be exchanging and discussing whole dynamic models. But I suppose this wider issue can wait until we're done with the coronavirus mess.)