It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said:

> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected

As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.

However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.

Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.