Journalists and historians will be sorting through the March panic for years. Only when governments fully declassify meeting notes and emails will we gain a more complete picture of what happened. But the most likely explanation is the simplest. Faced with a risk of hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths, the public health experts who for decades had counseled patience and caution flinched. They found they could not live with acknowledging how little control they or any of us had over the spread of an easily transmissible respiratory virus. They had to do something – even if they had been
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