4 ms·

I don't agree with that. There's a spectrum between information being entirely uninformative and perfectly informative. Daily case headlines are pretty close to

I don't agree with that. There's a spectrum between information being entirely uninformative and perfectly informative. Daily case headlines are pretty close to uninformative on their own, but the underlying case figures, in bulk, plugged into a model? It's certainly better than sticking your finger in the air. Predictions don't have to be perfect to be useful, and while there is a debate to be had where the threshold is between a prediction that's confident to be useful and one that isn't, writing _all_ predictions and _all_ stats off because they're not perfect is a bit extreme.

jacquesm 7y ago
That would require uniform reporting requirements between different countries, would require the healthcare system not to be so overloaded that they are not going to be able to comply with their reporting duties and so on. Sticking your finger in the air may actually be the preferred method. A model's outputs can only ever be as good as its inputs. If you want to base your policy on what is effectively random noise then you are going to be wrong no matter what.