Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/30/comparing-covid-19-to-other-ca.html
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Modeling virus spread and death totals has less to do with the virus than it does with predicting human behavior. There are more undiagnosed active cases now than when social distancing began in the U.S. If we went back to life exactly as it was before covid, then the predictions would be right back to over a million deaths. If we really get our shit together from here on, the U.S. death toll could be limited to under 100,000.
Personally I’m expecting the next year to be like the last 3 months, with too little preventative measures and waiting for things to get bad before something is done. In which case places will return to normal, then see a spike in cases, then go back to stay-at-home orders until the cases decline, then repeat.
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The flu alone has killed over 300,000 people in the US since 2010. How many people has your COVID-19 killed since 2010, eh? Answer me that!
Checkmate, atheists.
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Starting with Trump and extending to a relatively small number of other powerful people willing to make influential decisions not based in science or logic, how can we expect predictive models to work?
Can’t expect much from your psychohistorians when The Mule is sitting in the White House.
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What a bad article. Poorly written, light on numbers, bad diagrams, no charts. Awful.
Presumably the death rate over the next five years or so should be lower, because of the number of older people who died early from covid.
As soon as I read automobile accidents in Xeni’s synopsis I knew to give it a pass. While interesting to number crunchers that kind of comparison tells you nothing at all about what’s happening to us now. Just ask Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz and the other TV doctor on Fox News if you don’t believe me.
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