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.
I 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.
I 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.
Why 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.
Reminding 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.
How'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.
I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.
My 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.
> 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.
Then 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.
It'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.
So you're in charge of making decisions. Hypothetically. Your epidemiologists believe that if no action is taken, 10 people will die in the next two weeks, 100 people will die in the next 4 weeks, and 1,000,000 will die in the next 6 months.
Which forecasts would you prefer they keep to themselves?
Starting an implication with “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false” — you can put anything in the “then” and have the statement be logically sound - that doesn’t mean it’s in any way useful.
End of the day that kind of talk just damages trust in the scientific process, which has to be at an all time low with regard to epidemiology, as a result of the stream of certified lies that have been presented as public policy over the past few years. (“Masks don’t work” being the first of many)
> Starting an implication with “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false” — you can put anything in the “then” and have the statement be logically sound - that doesn’t mean it’s in any way useful.
1) Not when YOU are the person who determines if action should be taken!
2) You seem to be implying that action can be taken at 100,000 which will be effective at preventing the spread to 1,000,000 which may be true or may be false, but it's going to be far easier to stop it at 10 regardless.
> “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false”
Is useful as the higher bound and for judging the results of actions.
But still... I think you're too sure about people in charge following reasonable behaviours. We don't even have to go as far as the great famine. There's lots of things going wrong now where people responsible explicitly do not address the issue.
Update, this comment refers to the original blog post submission, which pulled out forecasted numbers with no context. The Telegraph article is better.
That 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.
That's not quite the right way of phrasing that question. Models are made with and without interventions taken into account, and the lockdowns were a reaction to models showing reduced deaths and hospital strain if lockdown measures were in place. I'm not sure what that guy is talking about.
But if you're actually interested, you should go and read the papers used for modeling yourself, since the odds of finding a rando on hacker news who is an actual epidemiologists is zilch. The ones who were public communicators that I followed over COVID were the podcast "This Week in Virology" which is just about the best resource you're going to find, and the blog "your local epidemiologist", who is also fantastic
The 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.
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.
quite 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....
They didn't need much more than noting Rt and experience of Wuhan, if you're thinking "IMHE!", sort of a red herring: yeah, they predicted X million of deaths, but it wasn't anymore complicated than take Rt, use in formula, and yeah we should probably see if we can eradicate this thing locally, early. Was never a global decision.
I live in Baltimore City and have to agree that it's troubled. Another thing that makes it difficult for the city to thrive is the abysmal schools. Middle schools and high schools are not assigned by neighborhood, but instead by a match system. In theory this offers opportunities for children in low-income neighborhoods that would otherwise have a too-small tax base for their local schools. In practice, it means nearly all city schools are horrible. "One-third of Baltimore High Schools in 2016 had zero students proficient in math. [0]" and "In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark. [1]"
Even living in the nicer, lower-crime neighborhoods isn't enough for families if the school options are untenable.
And the 8th graders in downtown schools are reading at a 3rd grade level (according to teachers there). Due to our wonderful federal and state education system, schools are forced to pass kids or they get less funds. So not only can they barely read and write, they're forced on to more difficult subjects which it will be impossible for them to take on.
Besides the opioid epidemic, this is the next big epidemic: an entire generation of kids who are being doomed by horrible policies passed by politicians who will never be held accountable for them.
As a fellow Baltimorean, I just wanted to echo this sentiment. I have a one kid, and another on the way, and trying to find a reasonable neighborhood in the city to buy a house in is a nightmare. Really we can decide between Mt. Washington and Roland Park, but as you pointed out, even the high price tag to get into those neighborhoods doesn't help much with high school. I'm really at a loss for what to do, I'll probably try to move over the the county line into Pikesville or Catonsville.
I actually work in College Park, so it's a nightmare of a commute. My wife and I want to stay this far north because both of our families are here and help out a lot with childcare.
Yes, but (at least in New York) the school choice system still drives a non-trivial number of families to flee to the suburbs. Parents really value predictability, and the competitive application process doesn't provide that.
I'm not saying it's a bad system, but there's definitely a trade-off there.
San Francisco uses a lottery for every grade, beginning with pre-K. This causes intense anxiety among many parents. But San Francisco doesn't struggle with the same problems as Baltimore, certainly not to the same degree. In the case of elementary school, other than the chance of not getting the closest school, the anxiety is largely unwarranted, IMO. I'm not looking forward to junior or, especially, high school, though. Unless we end up going the Catholic school route, which is surprisingly cheap--significantly cheaper than daycare.
Anecdote: A parent from our kid's preschool once told me they had a conversation with the principal of one of our neighborhood elementary schools and upon inquiring about the relatively early start time the principal told him, or at least insinuated, that the start time was designed to dissuade cross-town parents from selecting the school, effectively gaming the lottery system to favor neighborhood families.
My guess is that human enhancement for military use will be subject to international negotiations in the coming decades, but will probably not be considered under the Biological Weapons Convention.
Yes this can occur, but supringly rarely. What always amazes me is how rarely the reviewers ever agree on anything. Getting published is just a matter of sending out your work until you get two or three reviewers who say accept.
I have had the situation where all three reviewers said publish and the editor rejected the paper - of course this paper has gone on to get over 600 citations so it was not the best decision that editor has ever made.
I think this challenge has the potential to be useful. We launched a similar effort last week geared more as a hackathon [0], and we have some really interesting projects in the works. Even just simple visualization and analysis of the data hasn't really been done yet, but there are a lot of insights that can be pulled out [1, 2]. Similar civic hacking projects were launched during Hurricane Sandy, and some useful things came out of it [3].
This outbreak really is one of the greatest public health disasters of modern times. I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.
I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.
While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.
>While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.
I have donated money, but I now think this is distracting us from what is really needed. No amount of money poured into any NGO will allow us to get on top of this outbreak. Even with tens of billions of dollars a NGO like MSF is not going to be able to put in place the required treatment facilities needed, nor have the authority or ability to enforce an effective quarantine. We should be putting all our efforts into lobbying the US government into getting the required UN security council authority to act and activating the full scale mobilisation of the USA military. This is as about as serious as anything gets.
Today parameter estimates were published in the NEJM [0] that conflict with the model's default settings. The Eichner incubation distribution, and an infectious duration of maybe 11 days are better inputs, in my opinion.
Thanks for the link, interesting to play with and hats off the the CDC for being so open with their modeling tools. (also, what people do in Excel just blows me away)
I played with your suggested settings and while they are indeed alarming, I'm curious why you think they are better suited. They don't seem to fit the historical curve quite as well as the default CDC ones.
>(also, what people do in Excel just blows me away)
Same. I work in Excel pretty much all day and rock at using it as a swiss army knife. But when people use it to build these hectic models then I'm still thoroughly impressed.
The WHO is now reporting on Twitter that the species in DRC is not the same as the one causing the West Africa outbreak [0]. In other words, this is a separate emergence event.
[0] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/503673397990395904
