Its easy for people to sit back and criticise when they don't have to step up and make the hard decisions. They don't get much harder than this.
With hind sight it was a very expensive over-reaction but in the future hopefully the data collected (and still being collected!!) and lessons learnt from the way the whole "crisis" was handled will prove invaluable.
Its like an aircraft accident. So many crucial lessons are taken from a disastrous event.
Of course the above is all true, but many of us never considered that a decision of this magnitude would be taken by so few. it was anticpated that some air routes would be shutdown in a stair cased fashion and would be accomodatable by rerouting. The impact of this was so great that had the airlines themselves (IATA) been brought in right from the start I'm confident that they would have had all the experts on the conference phones within an hour.