I think there is an unwritten rule that in any situation no matter what, the authorities will try and put the best spin possible on it. Even if that means giving people really bad advice that gets a bunch of people killed that did not otherwise need to die.

There is also an unwritten rule that the authorities virtually always mislead , misrepresent, or outright lie to the public about what is going on in emergencies. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.

There is also the control freak thing going on that is very common in official circles. If they do not know what to do, they will tell the public to do something anyway because they do not want it to appear like they are as clueless as they really are in many cases.

Taken in its totality, it means you just cannot trust anything you are told by officialdom in emergencies. There is no way to know if they are giving you good advice or really awful advice, or whether the information they are putting out is true, false, or some combination thereof. This seems far less true in some areas than others.