For future reference: Never believe the wild-assed guesses of the disease modelers
It’s way too late now, but here’s a concept to keep in mind for the future, if there is one, when the next virus comes along:
Never believe the wild-ass scary numbers that an expert modeler of diseases from the USA or the UK or the WHO projects, predicts or guesses.
it ought to be clear by now that disease modelers can never be trusted to accurately tell us what the infection rate or death toll will be of any new virus.
Poor Dr. Fauci tried to warn everyone about getting spooked by high death numbers last month, but the media and none of the people in charge of us from Trump on down listened.
From Reason:
“To be honest with you, we don’t really have any firm idea” (about how many Covid-19 cases there will be).
“There are things called models. And when someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions. And whenever the modelers come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario.
“Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I have never seen a model of the diseases that I have dealt [with] where the worst-case scenario actually came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, a million-and-a-half, 2 million [deaths], that almost certainly is off the chart. Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”
https://reason.com/2020/03/30/as-trump-imagines-2-2-million-deaths-from-covid-19-in-the-u-s-a-top-federal-disease-expert-cautions-against-believing-worst-case-scenarios/?itm_source=parsely-api