Doing a lot of work to prevent something bad from happening is always hard to measure. “What if we overbuilt?” “Maybe the bad thing wouldn’t have happened anyway?” Disaster planning and preparation is an art, not a science.

You can’t measure the success really unless or until the disaster happens. And in those awful situations, we often reward the heroes who fought through the disaster more than the ones who prevented it.

For example - after the San Francisco earthquake in 1989, I remember a lot more stories of the heroes who saved people from awful freeway collapses instead of the designers of the other freeways that didn’t collapse at all.

As we get to Memorial Day 2020, I sense a lot of frustration with this shelter and how we are living right now. I have heard some people say “this Covid is awful but it isn’t **that bad**”

But some may be forgetting something. It doesn’t feel that bad right now because nearly everyone has radically changed their lives to try to prevent this thing from spreading. It is hard to separate the work to prevent from the outcomes.

The whole point of all of these precautions was to flatten the curve. And while it still got out of hand and we lost too many people in some places, everyone’s efforts did flatten the curve. This is amazing. Society adapted faster than I ever would have thought.

Now we need to get smarter. Which things precisely helped and which didn’t. The shutdown feels like a blunt instrument. But we shouldn’t just “go back” either. Many people won’t out of fear anyway. But we just aren’t having enough of the right discussions.