Current Coronavirus US upsurge

There is much about this whole ordeal that has me flummoxed, but this little nugget is exemplary of the biggest one. Why should anyone believe that everyone should blindly follow ‘the science’ when it takes a pandemic like this – and six months of it, no less – for something so seemingly basic to become news? If the people working on this kind of problem were so on top of things, wouldn’t this point have been settled a long time ago?