Let's talk first about the domain experts, professors in prestigious universities, that were reassuring the public that COVID-19 is no way more fatal than the seasonal flu [1]. The same moment that the ICUs in Italy and Spain were already overwhelmed and the physicians could not find the necessary protective equipment to keep saving lives.
Are there gonna be any legal repercussions to these?
Those two things aren't necessarily in contradiction. In really bad flu seasons hospitals run out of ICU capacity too, you see triage being done in tents, wards being converted, doctors talking about "wartime" like conditions etc.
Art can be contemporary. Science not. We are currently looking at 200k deaths in the USA [1] from COVID-19, in the good scenario. How is it even compatible with their 0.01% mortality rates? Have we forgotten how to divide numbers?
"We are currently looking at 200k deaths in the USA"
That is a prediction. It is not yet a fact.
Right now we just don't have a good idea of how many people 1) how many people are currently infected, 2) how many people have already been infected and recovered without being tested, 3) how many people were already immune and would never have been infected, 4) how the way you are infected changes the outcome of the disease.
The mortality rate depends directly on those numbers. Until we know those numbers, we just don't know for sure. With H1N1 initial estimates of the fatality rate per infection were almost two orders of magnitude too high. A similar error may or may not be happening here.
The best we have right now is a tiny handful of limited, non-representative, "accidental experiments" like the Princess Diamond, that may or may not represent how the disease spreads in the community (note question #4). This will however soon change as more randomized testing is done, and in particular, anti-body testing to determine who already got the disease and recovered.
This way of thinking is exactly what brought us here.
"We need more data".
No you dont need data, look at the ICUs you fool. They are struggling to find ventilators and in worse cases with lower capacity, even just for beds to deal with the influx of patients.
But you can wait for the data. They are incoming. Hopefully we will still be here in 2 months to discuss.
Are there gonna be any legal repercussions to these?
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...