6 ms·
The outbreak in Uganda is troubling, but a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. No professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a f
by cmrivers 4y ago
The outbreak in Uganda is troubling, but a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. No professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a few weeks because the trajectory of the outbreak changes in response to interventions and behaviors.
- jryhjythtr 4y ago>a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. Sure is, which is why it's odd we've been bombarded with endless graphs with months of predictions, over the past 2.5 years.
- hamburglar 4y agoWe have? I’ve certainly been bombarded with graphs showing trends, but six month predictions? Where are you seeing these? Can you point me to some?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jryhjythtr 4y agoSure. https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc... There are plenty that stretch out for a year.
- hamburglar 4y agoA naive google search is ... not a helpful reference.
- jryhjythtr 4y agoWhy not? It's the most efficient way I could think of, to display the sheer quantity, timeline, and content of the "Covid predictions" that we were shown in the UK. They are easily clickable, to show the original context (typically a news story or press release). You'll also note that practically all of them extend for at least 6 months. Also, you "asked for some". There they are - there's a lot of them.
- hamburglar 4y agoWell to be frank I clicked a handful of them and got tired of trying to decipher graphs that didn’t end up supporting this claim.
- jryhjythtr 4y agoReminding ourselves that you asked to be "pointed to some (graphs predicting more than 6 months)": It is not clear when the image in first result was published, but given that it includes error bars for dates from March 2020 onwards, I would assume this is the result of modelling performed earlier than March 2020. It covers until October 2020. Result number two is a direct link to this paper: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-researchers-model-likely-impact/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-res... It was published in March 2020, and predicts data till March 2021 Result number three is a direct link to this news story (with an ironic headline, given result number 4 below): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54831334 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54831334 It was published in November 2020, and predicts data until July 2021 Result number four is a direct link to this news story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53392148 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53392148 It was published in July 2020, and predicts data until July 2021 This is the garbage that was fed to the UK populace on a daily basis - it was like the "modellers" had taken charge. Will you accept that graphs predicting more than 6 months of results were in common circulation?
- hamburglar 4y ago> Will you accept that graphs predicting more than 6 months of results were in common circulation? I accept that they exist. I don't accept that we were "bombarded" with them. This is, of course, a US perspective, so perhaps your mileage may vary.
- slenk 4y agoDoesn't seem odd for news outlets, unfortunately.
- tinus_hn 4y agoHyped up drama sells newspapers. Unfortunately.
- Finnucane 4y agoFor ebola?
- yamtaddle 4y agoHow've I not noticed this? I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever and lots and lots of people in positions of authority who seem totally unable to extrapolate from those in their heads, resulting in idiotic back-and-forth on various restrictions for the first 18 or so months of the pandemic. Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy. But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those? [EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true. [EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoMy guess is a tone issue. It’s hard to even tell that you’re saying you haven’t seen long term graphs - the first sentence comes across as sarcastic when followed by long sentences complaining about other problems.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI thought: > I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever made it pretty clear, but maybe not. And the rest was expressing that the actual on-the-ground problem I saw, and the single biggest problem with my state & local-level response to the whole thing, was a complete lack of attention to future trends, not too much. But perhaps that doesn't come across very well. Mea Culpa.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoI guess as it transformed from epidemic to pandemic to endemic, it became increasingly predictable. The duration and peaks of the last waves could even be predicted by months indeed, as measures and behaviors remained practically unchanged. Not one of these predictions encompassed six months, though.
- jryhjythtr 4y ago>Not one of these predictions encompassed six months, though. I beg to differ. Here's a sample of what we got, on a daily basis, in the UK: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc... Plenty of those are dated from the early months of 2020.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoI stand corrected if that was the case. I followed WHO and Mexican predictions, and more speculative ones if the authors were honest about the speculation.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoThat sounds... wrong? What if the 6+ month forecast assuming no interventions is useful to compel an intervention, and the 2-3 week one is not?
- cmrivers 4y agoThen it's a scenario model, which asks what-if questions usually for planning purposes (e.g., what's the most hospital beds we might need?). Scenario models can have longer time horizons than forecasts, but 6 months is still quite long.
- knob 4y agoThat is a quite cool way of separating those models. Can you point me in a direction where I could learn more? RE: Forecast vs Scenario?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoIt's the same thing. Just the latter implies you're identifying an assumption or two as variable and modeling outcomes of some of them changing. They're all forecasts. To argue otherwise is semantic pedantry.
- mwint 4y agoIf “useful to compel” is a criteria, we can jump straight to flat-out lying and dispose with the statistics part.
- hammock 4y agoHow far out did the Covid forecasts look, to justify global lockdowns?
- jimbob45 4y agoThe fear with COVID was mutation of the disease into something more deadly and more contagious. What looks like fearmongering now was cautious behavior around mutation at the time. Conversely, Ebola isn't likely to mutate now, so we don't need that same level of caution.
- time_to_smile 4y ago> What looks like fearmongering now We had over 1 million deaths in the US. You travel back to 2016 and tell people we'll have a pandemic in the US, 1 million people will die, and then large groups of people will attempt to shrug that off as "nothing to get concerned about", people would find that incomprehensible. If I were to post a comment on HN in 2016 suggesting that people would shrug off 1 million deaths due to a pandemic because it doesn't align with their worldview I would have been downvoted into oblivious for holding such a laughably ridiculous and cynical opinion. Same could be said of the countless other climate related impacts that people in the very near distant past would consider horrific and impossible. The power of the "this is fine" culture to not see reality is terrifying.
- bushbaba 4y ago300k Americans die each year from obesity. Yet nobody seems to view this as an urgent issue needing addressing.
- RugnirViking 4y agoquite a lot of people do and have seen obesity as an urgent issue needing addressing. People at many levels of government, in both political parties, and for many years....
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
- unethical_ban 4y agoHow is it disingenuous to use assumptions for modeling?
- thedorkknight 4y agoThat doesn't make sense. I'm no epidemiologist, but have friends who work in disease modeling, and used to follow some virology blogs/podcasts. They usually make lots of models, each with different assumptions, specifically to guess what the intervention of different public health measures would do.
- cmrivers 4y agoUpdate, this comment refers to the original blog post submission, which pulled out forecasted numbers with no context. The Telegraph article is better.