Posted on 05/05/2021 11:36:16 AM PDT by Red Badger
Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic—experts or the public? A study from the University of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic.
Researchers from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication surveyed 140 UK experts and 2,086 UK laypersons in April 2020 and asked them to make four quantitative predictions about the impact of COVID-19 by the end of 2020. Participants were also asked to indicate confidence in their predictions by providing upper and lower bounds of where they were 75% sure that the true answer would fall—for example, a participant would say they were 75% sure that the total number of infections would be between 300,000 and 800,000.
The results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, demonstrate the difficulty in predicting the course of the pandemic, especially in its early days. While only 44% of predictions from the expert group fell within their own 75% confidence ranges, the non-expert group fared far worse, with only 12% of predictions falling within their ranges. Even when the non-expert group was restricted to those with high numeracy scores, only 16% of predictions fell within the ranges of values that they were 75% sure would contain the true outcomes.
"Experts perhaps didn't predict as accurately as we hoped they might, but the fact that they were far more accurate than the non-expert group reminds us that they have expertise that's worth listening to," said Dr. Gabriel Recchia from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, the paper's lead author. "Predicting the course of a brand-new disease like COVID-19 just a few months after it had first been identified is incredibly difficult, but the important thing is for experts to be able to acknowledge uncertainty and adapt their predictions as more data become available."
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social and traditional media have disseminated predictions from experts and nonexperts about its expected magnitude.
Expert opinion is undoubtedly important in informing and advising those making individual and policy-level decisions. However, as the quality of expert intuition can vary drastically depending on the field of expertise and the type of judgment required, it is important to conduct domain-specific research to establish how good expert predictions really are, particularly in cases where they have the potential to shape public opinion or government policy.
"People mean different things by 'expert': these are not necessarily people working on COVID-19 or developing the models to inform the response," said Recchia. "Many of the people approached to provide comment or make predictions have relevant expertise, but not necessarily the most relevant." Recchia noted that in the early COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and other individuals seen as experts by the media and the general public, were frequently asked to give off-the-cuff answers to questions about how bad the pandemic might get. "We wanted to test how accurate some of these predictions from people with this kind of expertise were, and importantly, see how they compared to the public."
For the survey, participants were asked to predict how many people living in their country would have died and would have been infected by the end of 2020; they were also asked to predict infection fatality rates both for their country and worldwide.
Both the expert group and the non-expert group underestimated the total number of deaths and infections in the UK. The official UK death toll at 31 December was 75,346. The median prediction of the expert group was 30,000, while the median prediction for the non-expert group was 25,000.
For infection fatality rates, the median expert prediction was that 10 out of every 1,000 people with the virus worldwide would die from it, and 9.5 out of 1,000 people with the virus in the UK would die from it. The median non-expert response to the same questions was 50 out of 1,000 and 40 out of 1,000. The real infection fatality rate at the end of 2020—as best the researchers could determine, given the fact that the true number of infections remains difficult to estimate—was closer to 4.55 out of 1,000 worldwide and 11.8 out of 1,000 in the UK.
"There's a temptation to look at any results that says experts are less accurate than we might hope and say we shouldn't listen to them, but the fact that non-experts did so much worse shows that it remains important to listen to experts, as long as we keep in mind that what happens in the real world can surprise you," said Recchia.
The researchers caution that it is important to differentiate between research evaluating the forecasts of 'experts'—individuals holding occupations or roles in subject-relevant fields, such as epidemiologists and statisticians—and research evaluating specific epidemiological models, although expert forecasts may well be informed by epidemiological models. Many COVID-19 models have been found to be reasonably accurate over the short term, but get less accurate as they try to predict outcomes further into the future.
Explore further
https://medicalxpress.com/coronavirus/
More information: PLOS ONE (2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250935
Journal information: PLoS ONE
Provided by University of Cambridge
Is it possible to do an objective, apolitical analysis of the “covid-19” phenomenon without including a detailed look at the role politics played in the pandemic?
Why, because I stated my opinion. I called the “Covid pandemic” a fraud. Stating …. “Preventatives were out there.” “Cures were out there” “and the numbers were screwed up to push the fraud.”
Facts? Preventative supplements were out there, Vitamin D3, Vit. C, Zinc and Magnesium were out there for about 10 cents per day dosage. Hundreds of reports verifying the positive and preventative effects were out there from medical experts and being reported.
Cures for the sickness were out there, also from medical experts. Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir. Given when diagnosed with the Covid it is generally gone within a week.
And the “NUMBERS?” - Look at the tragedy of thousands of sick people placed into senior living and nursing homes where so many more would knowingly become infected and die. So tragic that they passed away locked in isolation unable to have their family or friends with them as they died from the mistakes of those governors. And the reports are out there that more money was made from each of those deaths that could be attributed to Covid!
politics permeates everything.....................
lol. better than the “non-expert” group?
given that, not only were they orders of magnitude off on their predictions, but that the gross data reported by the cdc on infections/death itself is crooked, i love that they are still self-aggrandizing enough to pat themselves on the back a year out.
WOW !
The headline here is not that the experts estimates were better, its that the world wide death toll is half of the U.K. !
How is this possible when the U.K.'s NHS is supposed to be the best Socialis ... I mean industrialized nation health system on the planet ???
“The median prediction of the expert group was 30,000, while the median prediction for the non-expert group was 25,000.”
That suggests that the “experts’” performance was not significantly better than that of the “non-experts”. The difference may just represent noise, or a bias toward pessimism.
Taking the median prediction of experts is not the normal thing that’s done, in any case. An expert is supposed to be reliable; you should only need just one. What is the standard deviation of the experts’ predictions? it ought to be quite small. They are experts, so they should pretty much agree with one another, and, in hindsight, with reality, after all.
In my mind, someone is not an expert in a particular field if they lack a strong record of successful, actionable predictions in that particular field. The “experts” failed, so why should we trust them this time?
Because the experts say so, that’s why!..................
Hush. You’re not supposed to notice that.
Since age and overall health condition generated the vast majority of the deaths, statistics don’t mean a whole lot unless these factors are taken into account.
The Brits are probably older and sicker than the average country.
However, I agree with your general point that the British health care system’s performance is far below what the socialized medicine advocates would predict.
“politics permeates everything”
It seems to. But the mere fact that we acknowledge a difference between the two means we can identify that difference and proceed accordingly.
The predictions are completely subjective.
If you cycle a COVID PCR test 40 times, the infection rate goes way up.
If you count every person who dies with a positive COVID test as a COVID death, the death rate goes way up.
Imperial College, self-described as "China's best academic partner in the west," predicted Taiwan, China's oldest adversary, would experience 179,828 COVID deaths if they didn't lock down. Taiwan had no lockdown and had 10 COVID deaths, a 1,798,180% error.https://t.co/l8MlaRw1uH— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) April 22, 2021
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