While I understand the frustration, the reality is we shouldn’t be making fun of either. Just because the end result of something is inarguably “stupid” does not mean that any of the things that went into it are “stupid.” To do the Hacker News thing and make a bad analogy to computer science topics in a totally irrelevant thread, this is how I view a lot of stuff people complain about these days (think JavaScript, or Electron apps.) Real life is hard.

To be a bit more concrete, consider the following: if you have a system where people are not encouraged to follow the rules as written, they will work against the spirit of what is written as well as what is actually written. If you have a system where people are discouraged from not following the rules, they may still engage in things that do not follow the spirit or written rules, but there is some accountability. But you can also try to work around what’s written to follow the intent as well, and I think that is where you get weird, counterintuitive, “stupid” results that can still “make sense” (as opposed to clearly corrupt cases where it is “stupid” and also does not make sense.)

I think people, especially literal minded as many here are, prefer concrete rules. But the knock-on effect is that its not easy to simply proclaim they’re made up any time it’s inconvenient, and it really shouldn’t be. Perhaps, in fact in my opinion, definitely, the “escape hatches“ for when rules don’t work out practically are broken, but I still do prefer having rigid standards, especially for health.

Hopefully, although it is probably not going to happen, organizations can have some postmortem-style reflections on what went wrong, so that hopefully next time we can be better prepared. History loves repeating though, so, you know.

Keeping information from the public to avoid mass hysteria is one thing, but keeping information from hospitals so they don’t have to implement prohibitive protocols is daft. If the healthcare response would be unreasonable, the right thing to do is to deliberately modify the protocols, not pretend the problem isn’t happening.

In a perfect world, with a responsive and easily adaptable healthcare system ..

Also how do you keep information from the public without keeping it from hospitals. Widespread publicising of a controversial tidbit to hospitals would leak within the minute if not within the hour ..

I'm not saying I agree with how it was handled at all .. I'm merely pointing out the fairly obvious realities to the claims made, which seem strong on principle but lacking in pragmatism and consideration of the realities.

I'm not saying that the end result isn't stupid, just that sometimes no stupidity is actually required for us to end up in situations like this.

The people who will die because we haven't told them how to protect themselves don't care.

OK. But not caring about how we get into no-win situations is exactly how we get into no-win situations.

Or perhaps in a different light, neither do the people who would've died if we had chosen a different branching path with negative consequences. There is some implication that there was a better outcome easily available and that is not clear at all. There should've been one, but there wasn't necessarily.

Unless you say something like “look it’s airborne but that fact shall not be admissible into any future lawsuits on any topic” (and have certainty that that will stand up to review), I’m not sure you can fully equate to the current “it’s not been declared to be airborne transmissible.”