[stouset]

Pointing to the fact that some people were skeptical doesn't mean anything. There's immediate (and ongoing) skepticism that this entire damn pandemic is a hoax, FFS.

As with any expert group, the medical community defaulted to going with what they know. In the context of virology, in the overwhelming majority of real-world cases, diseases spread symptomatically. SARS-CoV-19 is genuinely a novel threat in the scale of its transmissivity while asymptomatic and while there was certainly evidence of this early on, it takes non-zero time for this component to be studied, verified, and understood.

You can't (or at least shouldn't) base public policy on reports that haven't yet been corroborated by data and experimental evidence. And being validated after-the-fact doesn't (or at least shouldn't) reflect poorly on decisions made before we had hard data of this virus spreading in a novel fashion.