The amount of people who pilloried and mocked conscientious experts like Sam McConkey and Philip Nolan, for warning stark case rises were indeed very possible, would want to be engaging in some introspection.

I try to never give an opinion on things I don't know about. In essence, I parrot the expertise of experts.

"I don't know, but I can educate myself" is my mindset.

That's a good way to live, deferring to expertise you don't possess and citing sources when amplifying experts.

Sam's projections on how many cases were possible in Ireland are bang on the money.

He projected 5,000 in Dublin was feasible and it very much is at this rate of growth. The per capita equivalent of 5,000 in Dublin was already witnessed in areas of US and Europe.

And yet he was called "scaremongering" and "delusional", and mocked for appearances on telly.

It was happening in all fields.

People dedicated their whole life to virology and you still had lads, who 1st heard of PCR in July, tell Cillian he's clueless on testing.

It's not scaremongering to inform the public what worst-case scenarios look like.

You should always want to know the best-case and worst-case scenario in a pandemic, so you can spot the signs of what way it is all going and adjust your level of personal risk.

We need to do a better job of listening to experts in their fields and a much better job of dismissing Whatsapp know-it-alls.

The experts might actually know what they're talking about, after all.