Saturday, April 18, 2020

Throwing darts at the wall

This headline is misleading: "Top coronavirus model significantly lowers total estimates of US deaths in new projection."

Here's why:
The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) lowered its projection of total deaths from 68,841 (with an estimate range of 30,188 to 175,965) to just over 60,308 (with an estimate range of 34,063 to 140,381) in an update published Friday.
So the range of the estimate here is roughly -50% to +>100%.  That's like saying a gallon of milk costs between one and eight dollars.  It's good to know we've backed off from earlier projections of 100-250 thousand deaths, but this headline minimizes the guesswork.

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