In March there wasn’t enough information to decide how strict the social distancing needs to be in order to reduce the spread of the infection. At the same time it was clearly necessary to do something, without knowing in advance how much it would affect the epidemic.
Now we can take a little more time to decide what to do next, and take more focused and effective measures.
There’s a difference between incorrect and incomplete.
Facts, like how many people in a trial of 23 recovered, can be shared and useful early on even though they’re incomplete. That’s different from attempting to draw a strong conclusion about what works from n=23, that might be an incorrect conclusion.
The form that the incomplete data took was part of the problem.
Adding numbers to a spreadsheet is one thing. When the same data takes the form of an NJEM or Lancet paper, it definitely implies--and some cases, outright says--more than "FYI: 37/53 people got better when we did [this]." Part of this is how papers are ordinarily written, but I think the authors (and editors) should have stopped all over the word "improvement" in those manuscripts.
