Re:Why it’s so hard to make a good Covid-19 model
by SpicyLemonZest on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:05PM
(#22825434)
I'm not happy to discount 100 years of epidemiology, and don't do so casually. But everything we've seen suggests that it can't produce accurate estimates of how bad a pandemic will be.
I don't mean to imply epidemiologists are bad at their jobs! Some areas of science are just like that. It's similarly hard to predict from first principles how effective a new drug will be or what properties a new material will have. But I've seen a lot of people say "we've gotta do suchandsuch because this model I saw projected it as the best option", and that's not a level of confidence these models can actually provide.
I don't mean to imply epidemiologists are bad at their jobs! Some areas of science are just like that. It's similarly hard to predict from first principles how effective a new drug will be or what properties a new material will have. But I've seen a lot of people say "we've gotta do suchandsuch because this model I saw projected it as the best option", and that's not a level of confidence these models can actually provide.