Being over on Christmas Island you no doubt missed this kind of thing:
Two groups of prominent scientists write open letters with conflicting advice on how to tackle virus
Coronavirus: why experts disagree so strongly over how to tackle the disease
Plenty more. Politicians could ignore their advisors advice (if given), but when the advisors can't even agree on the facts it's no surprise that everyone is seen as clueless, a shill, whatever insult is currently du jour. Oh, throw in two spoons of hindsight and it's a mix made for conspiracy theorists.
Thanks, very interesting.
I'm writing too much, I fear.
Anyhow, here are my last thoughts about the subject, but it's again about Engineering, i.e. optimized decision making in a commercial company.
Well, for both problems you can observe, that the decision makers/experts are fully focused on their problems, tried to solve them, get rid of them.
Those people were announced because they work solely on these domains.
These cognitive limits led to the big social and economic damages, as latter aspects were not addressed at all.
An optimized method is to bring experts from many different fields of knowledge to illuminate all possible root causes and especially all consequences of the different solutions. They also bring a lot of ideas with them.
In our company, we regularly solve the problem of terminated components, which is as well a real threat to our business, by calling in purchasing, logistics, quality, engineering, sales, process technology, manufacturing, layout, component technologists, as required.
The problem itself could be solved by purchasing only, to convince the supplier to withdraw his PTN. This only happens in 1..2% of the 300 PTNs each year, of course coming with a certain price tag. So the other colleagues all come up with their ideas, how to make a work-around, i.e. not solving the problem itself, but eliminating the threat, instead.
Logistics can organize an All Time Buy, Quality might look for alternative suppliers, Engineering could use 2nd source parts, make a re-engineering, Sales could offer the customer an upgraded instrument which would not use the component, and so forth. From all these solutions, you'd chose the optimal configuration, i.e. lowest price tag, shortest response time, smallest effort.
In case of COVID, it's of course very delicate to weigh up threat of human life vs. social and economic aspects, but latter as well are important for the well-being of people, in case of wrong decisions even more. But politicians only task is, to take care for the well-being of the people, in all aspects. Here they swear an oath on the Holy Bible to do so, but usually they forget and only do their own thing.
I always wondered, why here in GER no engineers or companies joint to the energy business were involved in all the discussions and decisions. Economy experts also were not consulted, as well not the population.
These Climate experts and activists just see the White Elephant in the room, i.e. a possible danger from Climate Change, create a lot of anxiety and brutally push through their 1 dimensional decisions, w/o any regards to huge losses or complete failure of our country.
My company would have long been bankrupt, if we would solve the issues that way.
Frank