Also from Germany, I have to disagree. The models pretty much nailed the 4th wave down to a T. Missed it by one or two weeks. Based on the assumption nothing was dine against it. Nothing was done against it. The models are good, they are just not used to prepare or base decisions upon them.

I agree with hef19898, here's a link to the prognosis of the Robert Koch Institute from July: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Yeah, the models in this program are definitely the ones you want to use for figuring out things in this situation.

Ordinary Differential Equation model, Partial Differential Equation model, Finite Difference model, etc.

Let's be clear here. There was the scientific response, and the political response. They do not work well together.

Science worked fine. Politics did not. This is not specific to Germany.

Same here in NL. Scientific data routinely gets ignored during policy making, either because the data did not originate here and we're supposedly somehow special or because it didn't fit the preferred outcome. The results are predictable.

> no one predicted anything remotely correct regarding Corona.

That is simply not true. The RKI (Germany's main institute for disease control and prevention) almost exactly predicted the current Covid numbers back in July [1]. The top left of the picture on page 7 shows the prediction under the assumption that 65% of Germans get vaccinated; currently 68% of Germans are vaccinated.

[1]: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Archiv/2021/Au...

I fail to see how their prediction was "almost exactly correct."

The prediction expected a bell curve peaking at the end of December, at around 400 7d incidence, assuming ~65% vaccinated.

We are at then end of november, ~68% vaccinated, and the 7d incidence is already above 400, and still rising.

We can only hope that they got the shape right, the timing slighly off and the peek not too off.

Where are our goalposts?

I personally think that for such a chaotic, human system, a prediction from six-months previous is pretty good if it's within a few weeks and probably less than an order of magnitude.

Probably depends on the input parameters. Lots of calls for freedom days and such as well as a general removal of measures probably changed the model conditions considerably.

You are confusing what the politician said with the models. Even now parties like the FDP are blocking the possibility of lockdowns just for the sake of it and not based on any scientific model.

As southern European and living here for about half of my lifetime, the whole management reminds me of the usual mess of Portuguese governments.

I actually never expected that somehow my home country would be able to manage better at decisions, instead of the yes/no/but-elections-are-coming that we had here.