The narrators of a documentary about the outbreak of the 2019 coronavirus make the point that millions of lives could have been saved if China had taken faster steps to lock down the Wuhan area where the outbreak began. They even go so far as to calculate the rate of disease if the government had closed it one week earlier, two weeks earlier, or three weeks earlier. They seem to think the government should have known to shut down the region at an earlier date than they did. What thinking error may be occurring with these kinds of analyses looking back in time