"Damon wrote, in part,
There is no science is the sense that we are dealing with speculation. We can't go back and see what would have happened during the 1918 pandemic if there had been different medicines or different policies. So there is no operational answer and we can't tell the truth about these hypothesis. And yet we have to try to make some sense of the situation and what it holds for the future. That it is not scientific is true. But maybe its better to have some forecast of the future than to be wandering around in the forest. That may be the best that can be done. Meanwhile, try to keep fine tuning the answer in terms of new events, and possible opposing arguments.
Damon, if you haven’t yet, I strongly encourage you to read this:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/cidrap-covid19-viewpoint-part1_0.pdf
Here’s a quote from the Introduction:
“When severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)—the virus that causes COVID-19—first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, even the most experienced international public health experts did not anticipate that it would rapidly spread to create the worst global public health crisis in over 100 years. By January 2020, a few public health officials began sounding the alarm, but it wasn’t until March 11, 2020, that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.The virus caught the global community off guard, and its future course is still highly unpredictable; there is no crystal ball to tell us what the future holds and what the ‘end game’ for controlling this pandemic will be. The epidemiology of other serious coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1, the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome [SARS] and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]) is substantially different from that of SARS-CoV-2; therefore, these pathogens do not provide useful models for predicting what to expect with this pandemic. Alternatively, our best comparative model is pandemic influenza. Since the early 1700s, at least eight global influenza pandemics have occurred, and four of these occurred since 1900—in 1918-19, 1957, 1968, and 2009-10. We can potentially learn from past influenza pandemics as we attempt to determine a vision for the future of the COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying key similarities and differences in the epidemiology of COVID-19 and pandemic influenza can help envisioning several possible scenarios for the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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By the way, Osterholm and colleagues used science to encourage us humans to prepare for pandemics like this, before this current virus had jumped to humans. His 2017 book, “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs,” is described here:
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