Told You So

As STAT reports today:

A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.” “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, home to several of the researchers who created the model, and who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

We indicated this weeks ago. Namely the model seems to be secretive. No one really knows what is in it. Second, the transmission of the disease is complex, it is not like malaria and the mosquito. It is person to person but not necessarily direct. Also mortality seems to be dominated by co-morbidities. No one really knew the specifics. Also the socioeconomic, demographic, and psychographic elements are complex to say the least. Complexity anyone? We have argued these factors for months!

As I noted weeks ago, perhaps these folks should get some good lawyers. Trillion dollar law suits anyone? Let us see who ends up owning the State of Washington. I know some good New York attorneys.