[ExI] Influential Imperial College Epidemiologist catches COVID and admits his models were off by more than an order of magnitude

[SR Ballard]

If UK went from 500K to 20K, then the US would go from 2.2M to 88K. It’s not nothing but suggests we are going through an over-reaction. Track and trace would have been the right choice. Alas, where are we on that one then?

But this is still a model, and can be wrong.

“Hospitals will be just fine taking on these patients” is not proving to be true. Hospitals in NYC are freaking out. They are not “just fine”. Elmhurst hospital is so contaminated by Corona that that’s basically the only patients they treat at the moment. They’re begging for ventilators, etc. 

When hospitals are not working properly, we will see a greater number of people die than we would otherwise expect. Death estimates have a built in assumption that X% will get hospital care and live. If they don’t get that care, they probably won’t live.

It is important to remember that his model is based on “if countries did nothing”. We will never know how accurate the original model is because literally no country is doing “nothing”.

We won’t know until we know. That’s the problem with models.