A Personal (Interim) COVID-19 Postmortem by Davidmanheim

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This is: A Personal (Interim) COVID-19 Postmortem, published by Davidmanheim on the effective altruism forum.
I think it's important to clearly and publicly admit when we were wrong. It's even better to diagnose why, and take steps to prevent doing so again. COVID-19 is far from over, but given my early stance on a number of questions regarding COVID-19, this is my attempt at a public personal review to see where I was wrong.
I have been pushing for better forecasting and preparation for pandemics for years, but I wasn't forecasting on the various specific questions about Pandemics on most platforms until at least mid-March, and I failed in several ways.
Mea Culpa
I was late to update about a number of things, and simply wrong in some cases even on the basis of known information. The failures include initially being slow to recognize the extent of the threat, starting out dismissive about masks, being more concerned about hospital-based transmission than ended up being justified, being overconfident in the response of the US government, and in early March, over-confidently getting a key fact wrong about transmission being at least largely via aerosol droplet versus physical contact. I have a number of excuses, of course. Most other experts agreed with my views, my grandfather passed away in January, followed by his wife in early March, I was under a lot of stress, I was very busy with my personal life, I was trying to do a number of other high-priority projects, I was not paying attention to the details, and so on. But predictive accuracy doesn't care about WHY you were wrong, especially since there are always such excuses. And the impact of my poor judgement was also likely misleading to others in the community.
At the same time, I feel the perhaps egotistical need to note where I was correct early, and what I got right - followed by a clearer description of my failures. I started saying there would be PPE shortages due to COVID-19 by January, and was writing about the supply chain issues well before COVID. I submitted this paper November last year with Dave Denkenberger, which was largely finished last summer, and it was accepted in February, which then took 3 months to get published. The delay was in part due to other demands on my time, but in retrospect, if it had been available 3 months earlier, it would have been far, far more impactful.
I also understood the failure mode we ended up seeing, and in my 2018 paper, discussing overconfidence in claims that pandemics would be rare, I argued that among the most critical risks was failure to respond to emerging pandemics which could in theory be controlled quickly enough. On the other hand, my failure to realize that this is exactly what was happening is perhaps compounded by the fact that I understood the dynamics, and should have been able to identify what was going on.
Lastly, I maintain I was correct in warning about the poorly thought out and in some cases outright dangerous "preparation" in some quarters of the rationality community proposed in March, such as advocating use of bleach and ozone in closed areas for disinfection. Some people in the community were stockpiling N-95 masks and food and buying up second hand ventilators, and as I said at the time, were at best being selfish and defecting. On the other hand, as I mention below, I was insufficiently clear about the need for better preparation, and waited far too long to speak.
Some of My Mistakes, and Related Comments
Slow to recognize the extent of the threat.
I said we should be very concerned in January, albeit not very publicly. I took until early March to start suggesting that it was clear that the US would expect to see large numbers of deaths. I was skeptical of valuable efforts early on, and didn't start really publicly sounding the alarm and reacting un...