Back in late Jan/early Feb, when I was taking the outbreak seriously enough to buy canned goods, I registered a probability estimate with a friend.

I said there was a 10% chance the outbreak would progress to the point where it would “significantly impact daily life.” 1/n https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1247967288931897345

Of course, whether an impact is “significant” or not is hard to measure. So I chose, as a specific line in the sand, whether “the majority of shoppers at the local Whole Foods would be wearing masks” at some point. 2/n

Was 10% a good estimate? Should it have been higher? I’m not sure.

One thing I didn’t foresee (that my friend saw more accurately) is how much the American public would resist wearing masks in public. 3/n

Our lives were *totally upended* for *many weeks* before mask-wearing started to become normalized. And even now we have a ways to go on that front. 4/n

In hindsight, the main thing I feel like I got “wrong” with this prediction wasn’t the low probability, but rather the sense for how the American public would react to an epidemic. 5/5

(Sorry if this thread doesn’t have much of a point. I’m just doing a little reflection on which aspects of this I understood at which points in time. Would love to hear others’ data points as well.)