It’s quite possible that you didn’t make a mistake. There are a few hints at mistakes in the post, but that’s presumably just a very short approximation of your actual reasoning.
I’d consider it problematic to treat degree of media panic as a decent proxy for actual risk. It’s almost cliché by now to compare reporting on terrorism to that on heart disease, but still a valid pointer toward severe failures of this proxy.
I suspect you may also be looking back on the 2009 H1N1 reporting and condensing about a year or so of reporting into one “media panic” blob. Comparing newspaper article records at similar times from the first known infections, it looks like COVID-19 reporting actually took off much faster and stronger in tone than that for 2009 H1N1.
I think a third potential problem, not at the time but right now, is a hindsight bias. Now that we know that the event happened, it’s tempting to update too far in favour of it having been likely beforehand. There are hundreds of new diseases and variants infecting people every year. During the first few weeks to months, their pandemic potential is often completely unknown. Paying little day-to-day attention to each one is rational for the general public, though not for epidemiologists or public health officials.
As a general probability, by the time a disease of this sort spreads to your own area (and therefore you should be changing your behaviour), there is almost always a lot more known and published about it. There is a low probability that any given person is going to be one of the unlucky first hundred thousand infected out of 8 billion people on the planet. By that time it’s usually pretty well known whether it’s likely to be serious enough to take action.
So perhaps your estimation wasn’t really as miscalibrated as you think.
It’s quite possible that you didn’t make a mistake. There are a few hints at mistakes in the post, but that’s presumably just a very short approximation of your actual reasoning.
I’d consider it problematic to treat degree of media panic as a decent proxy for actual risk. It’s almost cliché by now to compare reporting on terrorism to that on heart disease, but still a valid pointer toward severe failures of this proxy.
I suspect you may also be looking back on the 2009 H1N1 reporting and condensing about a year or so of reporting into one “media panic” blob. Comparing newspaper article records at similar times from the first known infections, it looks like COVID-19 reporting actually took off much faster and stronger in tone than that for 2009 H1N1.
I think a third potential problem, not at the time but right now, is a hindsight bias. Now that we know that the event happened, it’s tempting to update too far in favour of it having been likely beforehand. There are hundreds of new diseases and variants infecting people every year. During the first few weeks to months, their pandemic potential is often completely unknown. Paying little day-to-day attention to each one is rational for the general public, though not for epidemiologists or public health officials.
As a general probability, by the time a disease of this sort spreads to your own area (and therefore you should be changing your behaviour), there is almost always a lot more known and published about it. There is a low probability that any given person is going to be one of the unlucky first hundred thousand infected out of 8 billion people on the planet. By that time it’s usually pretty well known whether it’s likely to be serious enough to take action.
So perhaps your estimation wasn’t really as miscalibrated as you think.