5 ms·
Let's take his PDF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coronavirus-2019_Data_Michael_Levitt.pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR2h3YZ4z5JuMiK9BJUotDeGKzmj
by IvyMike 6y ago
Let's take his PDF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coronavirus-2019_Data_Michael_Levitt.pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR2h3YZ4z5JuMiK9BJUotDeGKzmjCiOLo7aV3-WOC8CpzIZak8IE1--wV8M https://www.dropbox.com/s/75uio2lyl5x4xxp/7.Analysis_of_Coro...
He presented a bunch of authoritative looking numbers and graphs, and says "if we draw a curve through these, we see this trend". And it turned out to be massively wrong, but he never issued a mea culpa. Instead, he says "Going off of the only numbers that I already had, it basically quite clearly said that inside Hubei, there would be a few thousand deaths, and outside of Hubei in China there would only be a few hundred deaths. And that was enough to give people more confidence in understanding the virus, though I don’t think it really prepared the rest of the world for what was going to end up happening. "
Yes, there is a reason that actual epidemiologists did NOT come to that conclusion: due to myriad factors, data about disease is messy, and you need to account for that. I never see him acknowledge that fact; I just see more "I connected these dots and extrapolated the curve predictions", even though that hasn't worked for him yet:
> I think it’s going to end up with less deaths than what I thought. In March, I thought there would be a total of 220,000, but there will be less than that. Right now it is around 155,000 in the U.S., and I am expecting it to end up under 170,000 or maybe 175,000.
- googthrowaway42 6y agoThe "actual epidemiologists" at the WHO waited months to declare this a pandemic after it was already clear it was spreading throughout the world. They did this because they are incompetent and were in the pocket of the CCP. If you want to fault this guy for something it's trusting the data out of China at all and even considering it appropriate to do analysis with those numbers. Again, 170k estimated vs 220k actual deaths is not a huge difference when dealing with a highly multiplicative event like a pandemic.
- IvyMike 6y ago170k is his "final count"; 220k is the current running total. There's plenty of time for an order of magnitude of wrongness.
- googthrowaway42 6y agoWell at that point we can revisit the discussion. Until then there's no real issue with the prediction.