Has President Trump addressed this? Everything, including these ridiculous opening phases are based off of these crappy models! I’m sure he’ll spend today praising Fauci for a terrific performance during his Senate hearing yesterday.
Trump just seems lost on this covid thing. Weird!
Part of this is the classic confusion/illusion of precision for accuracy. If you present a forecast that predicts to 2 decimal places, it will be preferred to one that predicts to 1 decimal place. The greater precision in the presentation of results suggests to a lot of people greater accuracy, when in fact the opposite may be at work.
I’m not as critical as a lot of folks here. Think of how challenging it is to model human behavior, travel, contact and other factors when everything you are working with is dynamic. People change their behaviors as information starts to seep out about the epidemic. In the initial stages people may have increased their travel (”I better get back home before travel is shut down...”) It’s no easy phenomenon to model, and until good data arrives it will have very large confidence intervals. Models are heuristics, they are helpful if they are better than mere guessing, but they are often well off the mark and their limitations should be noted explictly. Unfortunately, as has been demonstrated, the media covering this matter are quite ignorant.