I see a lot of motivated reasoning as to why this can't be as bad as serious models predict be without massive societal action. And I know these are desperate attempts to reason why the world must be similar to past experience, but it's hard to be sympathetic.
But all those thinkpieces two or three weeks ago, what did they accomplish? They sowed just enough doubt to slow action (and apparently some Medium posts got the ear of the White House). And now we are seeing the tragic consequences of insisting the world must be as you hope.
The curve is bending, our fates are not fully sealed. Hold the line. Keep distancing, be safe to reduce the background rate of hospitalization. Listen to epidemiologists with the experience to understand the complications and nuance. This will be a long fight.
We like to reason by analogy, which only works when the prediction is similar to our experience. When predictions deviates far beyond that, we desperately try to come up with reasons why they must not be right. Add to that how hard it is to reason about exponential processes.
(Yes, pedants, it's sigmoid. Which is very well-approximated by an exponential for the early stages, and it can still be in the early stages when it gets quite bad.)
