#COVID19 It's difficult to relate uncertainty about #coronavirus without sounding like there is something to hide, and certainly there is every reason to be suspicious of China's transparency. But sometimes uncertainty is legitimate, and communicating it is tricky. 1/
So headlines about really dire future aren't necessarily wrong but are less dire if you look at whole quote. And from preparedness perspective (the world of security folks), that there is uncertainty is not uncommong and means different levels of readiness. 2/
Two divergent pictures: One is that virus can/must be contained, and we can eventually get a pretty good feel for how far it has spread and how sick it makes folks (2-5% very, very sick/death). 3/
In this scenario, we will be wishing we had done everything possible for the potentially crushing influx of patients with respiratory needs. These are the alarming headlines and they are, in one reading of the picture, justifiably so. 4/
The other picture is that its easy to transmit and may have already spread throughout world and we haven't noticed because it makes only a tiny tiny fraction of people sick, and shows up like a bad flu season (this is what Dr. Lipsitch was getting at):
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This is sort of like what happened with Zika; it ended up being fairly common but a major risk to a certain pool. In this scenario, all the economic and travel bans may have been unnecessary. 6/
I say it again; I'm not a doctor. From the homeland security side, we are just consumers of what the scientific community is seeing and how we should think about preparedness: both scenarios and all the ones in between. 7/
We don't know the answer yet, so hopefully this helps explain the wild swings from the "sky is falling" (again, data could suggest that) to "this is bad, but we've also been here before" (again, data could suggest that). Uncertainty is not a friend of twitter. Or headlines.8/8
