5 ms·
Seeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.
by monkeybutton 4y ago
Seeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.
- naniwaduni 4y agoThe thing is, "upward of" denotes a lower bound, not an upper bound.
- monkeybutton 4y agoCool, "upward of" means "in excess of" rather than "up to". Thanks for the correction.
- kilovoltaire 4y agoHaha I always interpreted it as the opposite of that, but this makes much more sense!
- amelius 4y agoThere is a plague like this every so many years, so not difficult to predict.
- ianai 4y agoWe’re not entirely done with this last one yet, either.
- labster 4y agoHaving read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World. Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.
- pfdietz 4y agoWe were lucky SARS-CoV-1 was not as contagious as SARS-CoV-2.
- hammock 4y agoI don’t know why we’re all saying “a miss by (just) one order of magnitude” makes it a good or close prediction. After all, a guess of 200 million deaths is just as close to “excess Covid deaths” (one order of magnitude, but in the other direction) as it is to complete human extinction