Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say

[txradioguy]

A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.”

“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

<snip>

The chief reason the IHME projections worry some experts, Etzioni said, is that “the fact that they overshot” — initially projecting up to 240,000 U.S. deaths, compared with fewer than 70,000 now — “will be used to suggest that the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe, when in fact the predictions were shaky in the first place.”

That could produce misplaced confidence in the effectiveness of the social distancing policies, which in turn could produce complacency about what might be needed to keep the epidemic from blowing up again.

Believing, for instance, that measures well short of what China imposed in and around Wuhan prevented a four-fold higher death toll could be disastrous.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/

[catfish1957]

In my old jobs in safety and environmental model data were often used, and always had a 500% disclaimer + or - .

Predictive models are worthless, except when quantifying worst case.

[txradioguy]

In my old jobs in safety and environmental model data were often used, and always had a 500% disclaimer + or - .

Predictive models are worthless, except when quantifying worst case.

And look at what the worthless models for this virus have allowed people in positions of power to do?  Look at how people have just surrendered their freedoms based on this POS model that hasn't been right once since "experts" started relying on it.

[txradioguy]

Here's the money quote from the article:

According to a critique by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine, the IHME projections are based “on a statistical model with no epidemiologic basis.”