I’ve heard people with good judgment criticize the Imperial College modelling for countries outside the UK because the forecasts proved to be too pessimistic repeatedly. That’s interesting because I know that their UK forecasts were slightly too optimistic. They predicted 20k deaths for the UK initially, then updated to “probably a bit less than that” shortly afterward. And now we’re at 21k deaths already (but daily deaths slowed down a lot). I would imagine that their forecasting is the most accurate for the UK numbers because that’s what their main task is about.
I don’t understand that either—its like they got the shape and timing of the epidemic right but had a mistake in the scaling factor.
The other models I’ve been looking at that seem sensible—Covid-19 projections and the FHI both try to model scenarios where social distancing is relaxed to various degrees at the start of June, which is realistic. Both actually look decently optimistic to me, with no giant second wave anytime soon (instead more of a ‘slow burn’ with R about 1) even with ‘weak mitigation’ - which is basically what happens by default when people say ‘Morituri Nolmus Mori’. With moderate to strong mitigation imposed constantly (a big ask, admittedly) it stays gone.
Those roughly agree with the Imperial model, at least based on what we’ve heard of it—all of them agree that R is currently decently below 1 so we have a bit of headroom to relax restrictions in June without it blowing up in our faces immediately.
I’ve heard people with good judgment criticize the Imperial College modelling for countries outside the UK because the forecasts proved to be too pessimistic repeatedly. That’s interesting because I know that their UK forecasts were slightly too optimistic. They predicted 20k deaths for the UK initially, then updated to “probably a bit less than that” shortly afterward. And now we’re at 21k deaths already (but daily deaths slowed down a lot). I would imagine that their forecasting is the most accurate for the UK numbers because that’s what their main task is about.
I don’t understand that either—its like they got the shape and timing of the epidemic right but had a mistake in the scaling factor.
The other models I’ve been looking at that seem sensible—Covid-19 projections and the FHI both try to model scenarios where social distancing is relaxed to various degrees at the start of June, which is realistic. Both actually look decently optimistic to me, with no giant second wave anytime soon (instead more of a ‘slow burn’ with R about 1) even with ‘weak mitigation’ - which is basically what happens by default when people say ‘Morituri Nolmus Mori’. With moderate to strong mitigation imposed constantly (a big ask, admittedly) it stays gone.
Those roughly agree with the Imperial model, at least based on what we’ve heard of it—all of them agree that R is currently decently below 1 so we have a bit of headroom to relax restrictions in June without it blowing up in our faces immediately.