I don't know what that says about any of us.
If an analysis is making a reasonable effort to use the best or even some sort of relevant methodology in the field maybe. There is an entire field built around the learnings and failures of previous work that informs how we do things now.
In this circumstance the economist came in with no understanding or desire to understand any of that and through some random excel function at the problem to get the answer out they wanted for political expediency.
Not to mention the prediction was ridiculously stupid and anyone with common sense let alone an epidemiology degree could see it was going to be wildly incorrect within days.
THAT is the model being talked about at the highest levels of government when you have the entire field of the world class epidemiologists at your fingertips.
Trying to “both sides” this one because scientists who have spent their whole lives trying working on this got a little snarky is just missing the boat.
There are plenty of other places where epi Twitter is having productive cordial discussions.
wut. a quadratic only has one inflection point. that plotted curve clearly has 2.
The problem they are ridiculing is mainly that an observed time series that is going up and down with no clear trend is "modeled" with a polynomial that necessarily goes down, and that the tweet claims there is some value in the fitted polynomial.
Secondarily, the fact that the polynomial is described as cubic, when it appears to be quadratic.
Added together it makes it extremely explicitly clear that at the highest levels of American government, even in situations with the involvement of elite academic advisors, the actual technical content is utterly incompetent; childish; totally illiterate from a statistical point of view; bad even at high school.