The decisions that are being made during this crisis are far too important and complex to be based on such imprecise data and with such unreliable results. There’s been a lot of armchair analysis about various models being used to predict outcomes of COVID-19. For those of us who have built spatial and statistical models, all of this discussion brings to mind George Box’s dictum, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”—or useless, as the case may be.The problem with data-driven models, especially when data is lacking, can be easily explained. First of all, in terms of helping decision...