I think it is plausible that public officials have not gotten the most up-to-date scientific information on the disease as quickly as some randos on Twitter like myself. 2/

This is not necessarily a bug. Social media is full of garbage. Like, seriously. So much of what you read here is fake, or irrelevant, or unimportant. 3/

Some journal articles might have published something a month ago, but 100 other articles were released the same day that said something else. It's reasonable that you might have missed the *current* reality of the disease. We're probably still wrong about a lot of stuff. 4/

Worth repeating: write down everything you think about how the disease works and infects ppl. I guarantee (guarantee!) that a year from now there will be stuff that is wrong in that list. Even from the top experts. 5/

But here's the thing: this is not an excuse for bad policy. The lack of solid, scientific information meant that the *prudent* approach was to cut through the garbage to the things we KNEW were true, c. March 11. 6/

What did we know? China had been overrun by this thing. Italy was locking down the most prosperous part of its country. We were having trouble getting testing up and running. And we were seeing what looked like the beginnings of exponential growth in the US. 7/

You didn't need any other scientific facts about the disease to make the right call. You didn't need health experts, or scientists, or risk modelers, or anything. 8/

You just needed basic common sense: why wait for the disaster when you could get in front of it?

And that's the part that deserves criticism. Basically everyone except Mike DeWine failed. 9/

That this pattern has repeated itself everywhere in the "Western" world is not an excuse. It merely means that our political elites are not actually good at their jobs, and that this is a common problem. 10/10