COVID models still don’t work

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David Wallace-Wells writes,

Looking back, you could find a few lonely voices suggesting winter would be calmer than autumn. But the CDC aggregates and showcases 26 pedigreed models predicting the near-term course of the disease. On January 18, only two of the 26 showed the dramatic case decline the country experienced by February 1 as being within what’s called the 95 percent confidence interval. In other words, 24 of the 26 models said what ended up happening over just the next two weeks was, more or less, statistically impossible. The other two gave it, at best, a sliver of a chance.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The article correctly points out that the only clear differences in outcomes are between Asia and the West. I still wonder whether the two faced the same virus.

21 thoughts on “COVID models still don’t work”

  2. The virus faced two different populations. The only outliers are the island nations with European settlers.

  3. If you had just built a model on historic influenza patterns, you would have nailed the early/mid January peak in COVID cases.

    • You can easily slap the COVID case graph over a graph of the Spanish Flu. Virtually identical.

      • even the late March mini-bump we’re seeing in northern states is predicted by Hope-Simpson latitude-based influenza charts

  4. When you look at the difference between Asia (including Aussies and the Kiwis) and the West is that Asian countries by and large sealed their borders with limited exceptions (and those that got in had to quarantine in state run facilities) and Asian countries imposed fairly draconian lockdowns if any there were any cases of Covid. Aussies require permission to even leave the country. In the West, our lockdowns were minor inconveniences in comparison and while we did have travel restrictions they were not comprehensive or sensible (hello Tulum). I don’t see Western nations abiding by the draconian policies of the East. In point of fact we didn’t abide by lesser policies. So that has to inform future pandemic responses. It won’t but it should. If we could get the FDA out of the business of approving tests I think we would have done a much better job of limiting the scale of the pandemic in the first place and that is where we should start in preparing for the next one.

    • “Asian countries imposed fairly draconian lockdowns if any there were any cases of Covid”

      There were no lockdowns in South Korea or Japan. These countries also tested the least per capita among OECD countries.

      • Fair point. That being said, at the outset of the pandemic South Korea tested more than anyone else which likely helped it contain the pandemic. I don’t know if that is true for Japan. I guess then there is also the question on what they did with regards to travel.

  5. The modelers probably don’t know even half of the relevant variables.

    Good work if you can get it. They will do better next pandemic.

    • “They will do better next pandemic.”

      Lol – thanks for this! Better luck next time…

  6. Covid models don’t work to predict the course of disease, but they did work for the purposes intended, namely to enhance the power and authority of the bureaucrats and politicians by frightening the public. H.L. Mencken famously said: ” The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
    Covid wasn’t imaginary but this made it all the better for their purposes: the threat level could be greatly exaggerated as the public is poor at understanding relative risk, particularly in our highly feminized culture with its obsessive safetyism.

  7. And yet somehow still no one seems to have a problem with these sorts of models being used as the basis for perpetually-renewed emergency declarations that have effectively meant the indefinite suspension of the Bill of Rights. Literally EVERY doomsday forecast about the impact this “invisible enemy” was allegedly going to have on society since day one has been so obviously and hilariously wrong, but still no one shows any interest in questioning any of their initial assumptions about “the virus”.

    I guess it’s just easier to continue clinging to the belief that this hasn’t all been for naught, that the hospitals really would have been “overwhelmed” if we hadn’t locked down, that, even though our response was far from perfect, this “novel” virus really was so uniquely dangerous as to merit such an unprecedented and destructive response, that the emperor really is wearing new clothes and that you really can see them.

    • Hey, but the strategy worked, didn’t it?

      I mean, Trump’s not president anymore, there’s a “Democratic” congress, and the new regime nearly has carte blanche to do whatever it wants to the country.

      Hard to argue with “success.”

      Hope all the nice suburban Republicans who couldn’t stand Trump are happy.

  8. With regard to the difference between Asia and Europe / North America, I wonder if a previous, more mild coronavirus strain conferred some limited immune protection. Another factor is lower obesity in Asia.

    • Northeast Asia just had lots of state capacity and used it well and to its full extent, that’s all.

      We had less and used what we had terribly, and got exactly what one would expect.

      • I thought that to Famulus. Or maybe something to do with the bats. NE Asia may have lots of state capacity, but what of Cambodia and Vietnam?

      • No, you’re being overly reductive because you think it scores a point for your views.

  9. You also observed differences that were somewhat less dramatic but were still pronounced in East Asians vs whites in the West. Asian official numbers — low as they are — conflate East Asia, SE Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.

  10. This is the best balance I’ve seen to the vast genre of international covid comparison articles. This is the first time I’ve seen someone acknowledge that all of east and south east Asia did well when talking about New Zealand and Australia. Only thing missing would be some discussion of Belgium, which has been an outlier the whole time, but I’ve never seen it dissected in the same way almost everyone else has been.

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