Has anyone seriously suggested that the US’s measures are being carried out anywhere near “almost perfectly”? Quite the opposite, there’s been lots of concerns voiced that people aren’t taking this seriously.
> The revised model predicts up to ~127k deaths, which is certainly less, but not egregiously so
1) Are the policy implications of potentially killing off all of (say) Salt Lake City much different from destroying New Haven? I would argue no, not really.
2) Biological data is often a nightmare to work with. Estimates about behavior too. Getting something within an order of magnitude is often not too shabby.
3) Errors ('up to') are sensitive.
Here's a toy example. Suppose you think two numbers are each around 5, but the data are consistent with anywhere between 0-10. The sum of these numbers must be between 0-20 (low case: 0 + 0 = 0, high: 10 + 10 = 20), and their product between 0-100 (0 x 0 = 0; 10 x 10 = 100).
More data comes in and you can estimate each value more precisely: now you know they're somewhere between 4-6. You know the sum is actually between 8-12, and the product between 16-36. That's a massive decrease in the upper bound (64 percent for the product!) but literally nothing has changed except for the increased precision.
The COVID models have exactly this problem--none of the parameters are known exactly--and the outcome is some function of combining them. Moreoever, we're learning more about what factors matter AND how to fight the virus.
Any decent statistical model like this should include a confidence interval , if biological is so difficult then the CI would have reflected that . This just seems poor science to me
The 200k/127k people are harping about IS THE CONFIDENCE INTERVAL (well, the upper half of it, hence "up to").
That's half of my point--you'd expect the confidence interval to narrow with more data, regardless of what's going on. On top of that, you've got model error and non-stationarity (e.g., better care is discovered, driving the mortality rate down), which can't be reflected in the confidence interval.
Has anyone seriously suggested that the US’s measures are being carried out anywhere near “almost perfectly”? Quite the opposite, there’s been lots of concerns voiced that people aren’t taking this seriously.
> The revised model predicts up to ~127k deaths, which is certainly less, but not egregiously so
It’s a nearly 40% reduction!