Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn't guide US policies, critics say
The IHME projections were used by the Trump administration in developing national guidelines to mitigate the outbreak. Now, they are reportedly influencing White House thinking on how and when to "re-open" the country, as President Trump announced a blueprint for on Thursday.
The most notable bounces in the IHME projections have been for the eventual total of U.S. deaths by early August, which is when many epidemiologists believe the outbreak will be tailing off. Death projections for individual states have also fluctuated significantly. IHME uses neither a SEIR nor an agent-based approach. It doesn't even try to model the transmission of disease, or the incubation period, or other features of Covid-19, as SEIR and agent-based models at Imperial College London and others do. It doesn't try to account for how many infected people interact with how many others, how many additional cases each earlier case causes, or other facts of disease transmission that have been the foundation of epidemiology models for decades.
"Statistical model" refers to putting U.S. data onto the graph of other countries' Covid-19 deaths over time under the assumption that the U.S. epidemic will mimic that in those countries. But countries' countermeasures differ significantly. As the epidemic curve in the U.S. changes due to countermeasures that were weaker or later than, say, China's, the IHME modelers adjust the curve to match the new reality.
— Last week IHME projected that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would total about 60,000 by August 4; this week that was revised to 68,000, with 95% certainty that the actual toll would be between 30,188 and 175,965.
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