“That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.” “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. Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. 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. “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. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.” 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. policies, critics sayĪ widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington) is anther model policymakers have relied upon. Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas.

epidemiologist in this pandemic, recently warned, “I know my modeling colleagues are going to not be happy with me, but models are as good as the assumptions you put into them.” He’s right. And anyone who raised doubts about those predictions was pilloried by the media and the left as denying the “science.”Īnd yet models increasingly control our lives because policymakers use them to justify their actions and their votes.Īs Dr. And most pandemic modelers have been revising their worst-case scenarios.Įven so, the media have been obsessed with the worst-case numbers. Within a couple of weeks, the Imperial College scaled back its predictions, to no more than 20,000 UK deaths. and UK leaders were advocating a measured response to the coronavirus pandemic until the UK’s Imperial College-London released its model’s results predicting 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. In other words, the actual data did not match the models’ predictions, which left climate modelers and environmentalists scrambling to explain the discrepancies.Īnd yet leftists and environmentalists want us to dramatically alter the economy and our way of life – e.g., through the Green New Deal – based on predictions that might, but probably won’t, be correct.Īnd speaking of predictions that aren’t correct, can we talk about those coronavirus pandemic models? A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper highlights just how influential – and wrong – some of the pandemic models have been.īoth U.S. Nearly all climate models in the late 1990s and early 2000s greatly overestimated rising temperatures because they didn’t take into account what’s now known as the “warming hiatus” that lasted about 14 years – from about 1998 to 2012 – when global temperatures remained relatively flat. If you don’t believe the predictions of a climate model then you are denying the science, when what’s actually being questioned is many of the assumptions built into the model. If the assumptions are skewed, so will be a model’s predictions.Įnvironmentalists, the left and most of the media accuse skeptics of being “climate deniers.” But what many on the right are skeptical of isn’t actual scientific data, but some climate models’ predictions of temperatures and sea level rise 50 or 100 years in the future.Īnd yet the media regularly conflate the two.

Box warned us: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”Īll models are built on a multitude of assumptions, and many of those assumptions increasingly reflect the ideological and political views of the modelers. Indeed, they are often wildly wrong.Īs the late statistician Prof. That might not be so bad if the models’ predictions were generally accurate. Those models drive many of our public policy debates and much of the major legislation passed by Congress. The vast majority of Americans are completely unaware of how much models that predict the future of the economy and the climate – and now disease – dominate our lives. Predictive models dominate our lives - not always for the betterīY MERRILL MATTHEWS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/06/20

Guest “Yogi Berra’ism ” by David Middleton Source: First Coast Advisers

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