Worst case scenarios are very very seldom accurate

Political leaders have to make judgements very often based on three likely outcomes of a particular crisis, whatever the crisis is, war, pandemics, terrorism etc: mildest, hoped-for outcome, middle-of-the-range maybe-possible outcome, and worst case scenario. It's the last one that seems to be driving the UK government and other governments with the Covid-19 pandemic because none of them want to be caught out. Foreign leaders who initially said the virus was nothing to worry about like Donald Trump and the Brazilian president were proven totally wrong, dangerously so. Boris Johnson spent most of his time in the early days in two minds and tried his best to avoid a lockdown before announcing a lockdown, and then another one. They seemed extreme at the time but possibly necessary, and huge huge sums were forked out to keep the country's economy from collapsing. Now we have omicron and Boris is going mad, desperate not to make the same mistakes he made before. So instead of downplaying the new variant he is up-playing it, and the scientists who seem to love playing the armageddon card have been warning of the direst of consequences with millions of new infections and hospitals being overwhelmed with dying patients and huge numbers of deaths every week. We're back to the bad old days when that fellow from Imperial College predicted there could be hundreds of thousands of deaths. He was wrong. Now that sort of language is being used again. Hopefully the new worst case scenarios will also be wrong. Even wildly wrong. But in the meantime Boris and co are warning every day of more and more restrictions to come. The big question is: who the hell are we supposed to believe? Worst case scenarios are what they say they are on the label. During the Cold War the worst of the worst case scenarios was that the world would be obliterated by nuclear war. It never happened. I am just saying....