Issues with the IHME model.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

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, home to several of the researchers who created the model, and 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.”

The IHME projections were used by the Trump administration in developing national guidelines to mitigate the outbreak. Now, they are reportedly influencing White House thinking on how and when to “re-open” the country, as President Trump announced a blueprint for on Thursday.

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.

The most notable bounces in the IHME projections have been for the eventual total of U.S. deaths by early August, which is when many epidemiologists believe the outbreak will be tailing off. (Many expect daily deaths in the U.S. to fall to 10 or fewer by early June, from 2,000 or so in April.) Death projections for individual states have also fluctuated significantly.

More interesting stuff later in the article.

Loki

No update since April 13. They said they would update on April 15. Curious.

LuFins Dad

Please, it's not like the model was so bad that college dropout piano pimps were pointing out flaws... Oh, wait..

Loki

IHME has been updated.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

@Loki said in Issues with the IHME model.:

IHME has been updated.

Loki

@George-K said in Issues with the IHME model.:

@Loki said in Issues with the IHME model.:

IHME has been updated.

Florida should not be ignored just because it is inconvenient politically. Who cares if the GOP was “asleep the wheel” and didn’t apply the social distancing as coronavirus as spreading rapidly.There is real information in a different result that we can learn from.