It's actually not all that weird. The link I posted above is from a group that was funded by the NIH in a program called MIDAS (Modeling Infectious Disease Agen

It's actually not all that weird. The link I posted above is from a group that was funded by the NIH in a program called MIDAS (Modeling Infectious Disease Agent Study). The express goal was to produce modeling platforms usable by the government. Imperial's MRC group has a very similar mandate, IIRC. Where these numbers are coming from, and the range of uncertainty around them, is very much characteristic of an emerging infectious disease (bad early data, stochasticity, etc.).