Sure is, which is why it's odd we've been bombarded with endless graphs with months of predictions, over the past 2.5 years.
Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy.
But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those?
[EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true.
[EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.
> I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever
made it pretty clear, but maybe not. And the rest was expressing that the actual on-the-ground problem I saw, and the single biggest problem with my state & local-level response to the whole thing, was a complete lack of attention to future trends, not too much. But perhaps that doesn't come across very well. Mea Culpa.
https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...
I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.
https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...
There are plenty that stretch out for a year.
It is not clear when the image in first result was published, but given that it includes error bars for dates from March 2020 onwards, I would assume this is the result of modelling performed earlier than March 2020. It covers until October 2020.
Result number two is a direct link to this paper:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-res...
It was published in March 2020, and predicts data till March 2021
Result number three is a direct link to this news story (with an ironic headline, given result number 4 below):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54831334
It was published in November 2020, and predicts data until July 2021
Result number four is a direct link to this news story:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53392148
It was published in July 2020, and predicts data until July 2021
This is the garbage that was fed to the UK populace on a daily basis - it was like the "modellers" had taken charge.
Will you accept that graphs predicting more than 6 months of results were in common circulation?
I accept that they exist. I don't accept that we were "bombarded" with them. This is, of course, a US perspective, so perhaps your mileage may vary.
I beg to differ. Here's a sample of what we got, on a daily basis, in the UK:
https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...
Plenty of those are dated from the early months of 2020.
If you're confused on that point vs sinister authoritarian actions, then the risk of other people lying to you is far from your biggest problem.
Which forecasts would you prefer they keep to themselves?
End of the day that kind of talk just damages trust in the scientific process, which has to be at an all time low with regard to epidemiology, as a result of the stream of certified lies that have been presented as public policy over the past few years. (“Masks don’t work” being the first of many)
Is useful as the higher bound and for judging the results of actions.
But still... I think you're too sure about people in charge following reasonable behaviours. We don't even have to go as far as the great famine. There's lots of things going wrong now where people responsible explicitly do not address the issue.
1) Not when YOU are the person who determines if action should be taken!
2) You seem to be implying that action can be taken at 100,000 which will be effective at preventing the spread to 1,000,000 which may be true or may be false, but it's going to be far easier to stop it at 10 regardless.
But if you're actually interested, you should go and read the papers used for modeling yourself, since the odds of finding a rando on hacker news who is an actual epidemiologists is zilch. The ones who were public communicators that I followed over COVID were the podcast "This Week in Virology" which is just about the best resource you're going to find, and the blog "your local epidemiologist", who is also fantastic
Florida vs California.
read up.
States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks (Nov 18, 2020)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-stat...
> Nov 18, 2020
Looks at deaths per capita, from Jan 2020 to today. The position of peaks is barely relevant compared to their cumulative impact.
Do I sense attitude? If so, why?
Can you explain why?
We had over 1 million deaths in the US.
You travel back to 2016 and tell people we'll have a pandemic in the US, 1 million people will die, and then large groups of people will attempt to shrug that off as "nothing to get concerned about", people would find that incomprehensible.
If I were to post a comment on HN in 2016 suggesting that people would shrug off 1 million deaths due to a pandemic because it doesn't align with their worldview I would have been downvoted into oblivious for holding such a laughably ridiculous and cynical opinion.
Same could be said of the countless other climate related impacts that people in the very near distant past would consider horrific and impossible.
The power of the "this is fine" culture to not see reality is terrifying.