“The truth is we’re not very good at making those predictions, but sometimes poor predictions are better than no predictions at all.”
John Drake in relation to predicting pandemics.1
Director of the University of Georgia Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases
In Part I of my reflections I cited the New York Times worst-case estimated for COVID-19 deaths in the USA. The estimate was between 200,000 and 1.7 million people.2 There is an enormous difference between 200,000 and 1.7 million. This started me down the path of researching and reflecting on COVID-19 predictions.
The most reliable source for up-to-date COVID-19 predictions seems to be https://covid19.healthdata.org ran by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME – http://www.healthdata.org). They detailed their methods which are under peer review.3 Figure 1 is their projectons for the numbers of deaths per day that was accessed on April 7, 2020.
I have put a green box around the small print: “Shaded area indicates uncertainty.” At the peak the range of deaths per day varies between 1,200 and 8,000. Again this is a vast difference in the possible prediction.
These large variances do not even take into account game changing events. If a treatment is found that is 50% effective (or more) then all these predictions change for the better. God forbid, but if an additional air borne pandemic starts then the deaths per day could skyrocket. Not to mention a miraculous God intervention of some type.
I do not want to advocate that we ignore the predictions, that would be foolish. At the same time we must remember that the scientist making the predictions also have a high degree of uncertainty. All of this to say: The predictions are unpredictable.
Notes
1 Dhapte, Prajakta. “Predicting Pandemics: It’s Not Easy, but Researchers Are Trying.” Georgia Health News, 25 Jan 2019. accessed 7 Apr 2020, https://www.georgiahealthnews.com/2019/01/predicting-pandemics-easy-researchers/.
2 Fink, Sheri. “Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths.” New York Times, 13 March 2020. accessed 2 Apr 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html.
3 Murray, Christopher J. L. “Forecasting Covid-19 Impact on Hospital Bed-Days, Icu-Days, Ventilator-Days and Deaths by Us State in the Next 4 Months.” medRxiv (2020). accessed 7 Apr 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752.