What's interesting about being alive right now is the knowledge that we will only really understand what was really happening many years from now — that clouds nearly any confident assertion of anything

— Tim Wu (@superwuster) May 18, 2020

And yet as with climate change, that does not prevent a person or a society from acting correctly now, even with imperfect knowledge.

I don’t like this framing because it implies that without the complete picture, we can do nothing. But that is just not the case. We knew the right actions to undertake to break the pandemic and ameliorate its effects, we just did not do them.

Simple as that.