It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I understood exponential growth at that point to know that, because it wasn't being contained (no

It was unreasonable at that point. I'm no epidemiologist, but I understood exponential growth at that point to know that, because it wasn't being contained (no measures with a reasonable chance of containment were being taken at exactly the time when they really had to be taken), there was no stopping the exponential growth in the near term in the US. And especially once it was spreading in Italy, there was just not a credible reason to say "it cannot happen here." You should mistrust people's judgement in the future on similar such topics if they were dismissive of the possibility of this happening. You should update your Bayesian priors about the credibility and judgement of those people on topics such as this. And that IS constructive. Doesn't mean that those people are useless, but unless you've seen a mea culpa from them, you should look warily on future such predictions. You should note to yourself "this person may be prone to downplaying some risks and interpreting things over-optimistically, with some amount of wishful thinking."