Bottom Line: The Models Were Wildly Wrong And Deaths Skew Very OId And Sick

In light of real-life numbers, he draconian shut-down was a knee-jerk over reaction. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s another not to correct it. The talk today of another four to eight weeks of civilizational shut-down is illogical, irrational and wrong.

At the very least, let young people get back to work. If this continues, there won’t be work for young people to get back to.

The death toll skews heavily over 75. Most of those in this age group are retired – and wouldn’t effect the job force.

Just so you have a sense of the real-relative risks by age, here is the most recent age-stratified data from New York City: pic.twitter.com/RUWV1LiBeQ

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 10, 2020

“I pause to stress that I am not belittling the threat of the virus, particularly to people who are especially vulnerable — the elderly and those with underlying health problems, especially respiratory problems. The question is one of balance.” 1 https://t.co/T9ILEVhEyB

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) April 10, 2020

Related: Official IMHE Model for Coronavirus Used by CDC Just Cut Their Numbers by Half

Actual Hospitalizations for Coronavirus Significantly Lower than Projections in Model

‘Models don’t match reality’: White House coronavirus chief rejects doomsday predictions

Coronavirus: Hysteria Vs. Science

U.S. COVID-19 Projection Models Are Proving to Be Unreliable

National Review, April 9, 2020:

To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.
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Ezra Klein’s Alternate Reality

As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April 5 to about 136,000.

On April 8, the projected cumulative deaths were slashed to 60,145 (with the upper range again cut, to about 126,000). That is, in less than a week, the model proved to be off by more than 33 percent.

My use of the term “off” is intentional. There is no shortage of government spin, regurgitated by media commentators, assuring us that the drastic reductions in the projections over just a few days powerfully illustrate how well social distancing and the substantial shuttering of the economy is working. Nonsense. As Alex Berenson points out on Twitter, with an accompanying screenshot data updated by IHME on April 1, the original April 2 model explicitly “assum[ed] full social distancing through May 2020.”

The model on which the government is relying is simply unreliable. It is not that social distancing has changed the equation; it is that the equation’s fundamental assumptions are so dead wrong, they cannot remain reasonably stable for just 72 hours.

And mind you, when we observe that the government is relying on the models, we mean reliance for the purpose of making policy, including the policy of completely closing down American businesses and attempting to confine people to their homes because, it is said, no lesser measures will do. That seems worth stressing in light of this morning’s announcement that unemployment claims spiked another 6.6 million (now well over 16 million in just the past couple of weeks), to say nothing of the fact that, while the nation reels, the Senate has now chosen to go on recess, having failed, thanks to Democratic obstinacy, to enact legislation to give more relief to our fast-shrinking small-business sector.

As I detailed in the last post, the revised April 5 model was grossly wrong even in predicting conditions that would obtain on April 5 itself. It had predicted that on that day, New York, the epicenter of the crisis, would need about 24,000 hospital beds, including 6,000 ICU beds. In fact, the model was off by a third — New York had 16,479 hospitalized COVID patients, 4,376 that were in ICU.

On April 8, IHME reduced the total number of hospital beds it had predicted would be needed nationally by a remarkable 166,890 — down to 95,202 from the 262,092 it had predicted less than a week earlier (i.e., it was nearly two-thirds off). The ICU projection over that same week was cut in half: to 19,816 on April 8, down from 39,727 on April 2. The projected need for ventilators also fell by nearly half, to 16,845 from 31,782.

Because of the way the media report on skepticism about models and a desire to get reliable facts (which used to be the media’s job), I pause to stress that I am not belittling the threat of the virus, particularly to people who are especially vulnerable — the elderly and those with underlying health problems, especially respiratory problems. The question is one of balance. American lives are being shattered by the restrictions that have been put in place. The decision to do that was based on models. Those models have no credibility. They now tell us that about 61,000 may die of coronavirus this year — although, if the last few days are any indication, that number could be revised downward soon, perhaps substantially.

To compare, the CDC estimates that 61,000 people died from the flu in the extraordinarily bad 2017–2018 period. It has become fashionable to ridicule flu comparisons, but they are surely relevant, even if it is true that coronavirus is more readily transmissible and has a higher fatality rate. For this year, the CDC projects that flu deaths will range between 24,000 and 63,000, and that hospitalizations could surge as high as 730,000 (out of the 18 to 26 million people who are treated for flu, out of as many as 55 million Americans who experience flu-related illnesses). We don’t shut the country down for that.

The question of when government officials will reopen the country they have shut down for coronavirus presses, as does the question of whether some less-draconian measures than the ones in place could suffice. Hopefully, officials will have a better answer than, “Well, our models say …”

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Poetcomic1

4 years ago

We are beginning to hear the voices of the desperate, destroyed and ruined shut away in their isolation. Just as ‘for instance’ the many tens of thousands of recovering addicts who were suddenly cut off from their AA and similar type meetings. I believe the long term death toll ALREADY will surpass the Flu death toll in shortened lives, suicides and domestic violence. Divorce filings have risen 50% in NYC since the shutdown. It will HAVE to be May 1st and no ‘extra cautious’ measures. General Lucas was ‘careful and cautious’ at the battle of Anzio and turned what could have been a swift effective operation into a nightmare bloodbath.

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volksnut

4 years ago

Reply to  Poetcomic1

Well hows that when our overall death rates are below what the averages have been over the last 4 years?

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Suresh

4 years ago

Estimate was 1 Million . Expected now is below 100,000 ! As of now its 14,000 .

Italy its 11,000 Plus

china says they have 4000 deaths !

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felix1999

4 years ago

Reply to  Suresh

LOL!
Report:
China’s Coronavirus Data Off by Millions of Cases
JOHN HAYWARD 10 Apr 2020

A report published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week denounced China’s official coronavirus statistics as mathematically improbable and estimated the true number of infections from the epidemic in China was about 2.9 million, over a hundred times the total of 81,907 infections claimed by Beijing as of Friday.
…
The authoritarian regime in Beijing employs millions of human censors, plus artificial intelligence to control speech and suppress information. China routinely lies about the state of its economy, and it doesn’t even pretend to measure unemployment, so it also has plenty of information space to conceal the shocks from mass infections and harsh responses that dominate headlines in other countries.

The AEI report concluded by noting the Chinese Communist Party has worked hard to make outside estimates of the pandemic difficult and imprecise. The choice for outside observers is to accept calculations using the lowest realistic factors available, which puts the true number of cases close to three million, or “you can believe that 1.2 million travelers from ground zero of a pandemic, some freely circulating for weeks, resulted in national contagion of a little over 15,000 cases.”
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/04/10/report-chinas-coronavirus-data-off-millions-cases/

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Suresh

4 years ago

Reply to  felix1999

They are master of the art of Lying. And forcing ppl to believe their lies !

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DVader

4 years ago

Reply to  Suresh

As of 4/11 the US body count is up to 19000+. And climbing by a couple of thousand a day.

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felix1999

4 years ago

Bill Gates produces MS products that are crap. Why would we expect, Bill Gates modeling through IHME, extensively used to be any better?

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Larry

4 years ago

Reply to  felix1999

Bill Gates is not longer in control of MS. Hasn’t been for awhile.

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volksnut

4 years ago

I thought that was the demorats ” agenda ” anyway – to have the entire country devolve into a 3rd world socialist banana republic with everyone on welfare – with them at the ” helm “

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Dennis

4 years ago

There is another explanation for the downward revision of the models. Perhaps the models were correct origiinally but things have changed because of hydroxychloroquine, zithromyacin, and zinc. Rather than trashing the models, perhaps we should be praising Trump for making treatment available.

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DVader

4 years ago

Reply to  Dennis

Assuming those treatments actually work, you’re talking like they’re available to everybody. They’re not.

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Dennis

4 years ago

Reply to  DVader

“…in the New York health and hospitals system, virtually every patient now that comes in presenting COVID-19 symptoms is given a cycle of hydroxychloroquine,…”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/06/navarro_virtually_every_covid-19_patient_in_new_york_is_given_hydroxychloroquine.html

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DVader

4 years ago

Last time I looked, 60,145 dead people is a lot of dead people. And how many would it have been if we’d kept the economy open?

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