If that is the best a hatchet job can do, I don’t see anything too damning there. In situations like this, only very minor things need to slightly shift to have very different outcomes. There’s a world in which this coronavirus never left China, and there’s another world in which we were hit even worse than we are now. What lay people often struggle to appreciate is that whilst we may ordinarily deal with exact figures and exact predictions, modellers and statisticians deal with confidence interval ranges. Just because a modellers’s worst outcome in their confidence interval doesn’t come to pass, doesn’t mean they were wrong as such.