[TheOtherHobbes]

Believing there's an option to do nothing until more data is available is a luxurious fallacy.

By then it's too late. Obviously.

That's the problem with exponential growth. Not much seems to happen until suddenly it all happens at once, and the only chance to prevent that was a few weeks ago.

[jrochkind1]

I don't understand your theory of when it's appropriate to impose restrictions before you have enough data to know they are useful or necessary.

Is your suggestion, what, to impose the strictest restrictions possible everywhere, forever, just in case, because by the time we know it's really necessary it's too late, so we should always do it without knowing it's necessary?

Like, what do you think should trigger restrictions? Just finding a variant? Should all the variants Alpha through Mu have triggered global worldwide lockdown, because if they had turned out more dangerous than they did, by the time we had found that out it would have been too late? Basically we should lock down until there are no more variants? (Will that ever happen?)