I sent a similar text to a medically vulnerable friend on Jan 25 saying I thought it was "scary, but not the scariest thing in the world right now", despite hav

I sent a similar text to a medically vulnerable friend on Jan 25 saying I thought it was "scary, but not the scariest thing in the world right now", despite having spent some time working with an epidemiology research group. In hindsight, I knew enough to take the risk much more seriously. This article: https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-it-will-probably-go-pandemic-and-we-should-all-prepare-now/ https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-i..., plus the rising mortality numbers, spurred me to start warning the medically vulnerable people in my life on Feb 23. I am very grateful to the authors for helping me do the right thing. At this point, it seems to me that our experts are still letting us down in two important ways: 1. They aren't rebutting this implicit notion that any mortality risk below 1% can be rounded down to zero. As a consequence, the idea that it might be a good idea to let younger, healthy people just go out and get the virus and get immune seems to still have currency, and this is really dangerous. We can't open things back up until we have a credible plan for driving the infection rate toward zero. Leaving aside the risk of life-changing injury, a mortality risk of eg 0.5% applied to eg half of young adults would still be by far the most dangerous thing that happens to most of them this year, and a huge personal tragedy for many of us. Do the math and work out how many people you know would die. 2. Simple, inexpensive measures like widespread masking, handwashing, gloves and eye protection will clearly be important components of any credible plan for driving the infection rate toward zero, unless we get an early vaccine. The experts should be hammering the point that we all need to be fastidious about those things whenever we open back up again.