[BostonCard]

I think this is a good piece on how to think of mathematical models of disease (fivethirtyeight also had a discussion of this, I'll see if I can find)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fu...dium=email

They had this to say about the IHME model:

A recent model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has received considerable attention and has been widely quoted by government officials.5 On the surface, the model yields specific predictions of the day on which COVID-19 deaths will peak in each state and the cumulative number of deaths expected over the next 4 months (with substantial uncertainty intervals). However, caveats in these projections may not be widely appreciated by the public or policy makers because the model has some important but opaque limitations. For instance, the predictions assumed similar effects from social distancing as were observed elsewhere in the world (particularly in Hubei, China), which is likely optimistic. The projected fatality model was not based on any epidemiological science and depended on current data on the reported prior increasing number of fatalities in each region—data that are widely acknowledged to be undercounted and poorly reported6—and did not consider the possibility of any second wave of infections. Although the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation is continuously updating projections as more data become available and they adapt their methods,7 long-term mortality projections already have shown substantial volatility; in New York, the model predicted a total of 10 243 COVID-19 deaths on March 27, 2020, but the projected number of deaths had increased to 16 262 by April 4, 2020—a 60% increase in a matter of days. Some original projections were quickly at the edge of earlier uncertainty bands that were apparently not sufficiently wide.

Interestingly, though, if you take a meta view of models the extreme outlier models are likely to have been wrong (we are unlikely to see 2 million deaths as the worst models predicted, and we already have more deaths than the most benign models predicted).  My guess is that we will probably land on the low end or slightly below the range of the original IHME model, which predicted 100 - 240,000 deaths, but probably a bit above their revised model of 60,000 deaths.

If you assume we've hit a peak, and as burger notes, we follow a slow linear decline in deaths as Italy did, then you can do some crude estimates.  Starting at an average of about 2000 deaths per day since April 8 (it has been pretty steady), if the daily death toll goes down linearly over the next two months (by about 33/day), you would get ~60,000 deaths between now and mid-June, which gets us to about 100,000 total deaths.

BC

[BostonCard]

I think this is a good piece on how to think of mathematical models of disease (fivethirtyeight also had a discussion of this, I'll see if I can find)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fu...dium=email

They had this to say about the IHME model:

A recent model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has received considerable attention and has been widely quoted by government officials.5 On the surface, the model yields specific predictions of the day on which COVID-19 deaths will peak in each state and the cumulative number of deaths expected over the next 4 months (with substantial uncertainty intervals). However, caveats in these projections may not be widely appreciated by the public or policy makers because the model has some important but opaque limitations. For instance, the predictions assumed similar effects from social distancing as were observed elsewhere in the world (particularly in Hubei, China), which is likely optimistic. The projected fatality model was not based on any epidemiological science and depended on current data on the reported prior increasing number of fatalities in each region—data that are widely acknowledged to be undercounted and poorly reported6—and did not consider the possibility of any second wave of infections. Although the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation is continuously updating projections as more data become available and they adapt their methods,7 long-term mortality projections already have shown substantial volatility; in New York, the model predicted a total of 10 243 COVID-19 deaths on March 27, 2020, but the projected number of deaths had increased to 16 262 by April 4, 2020—a 60% increase in a matter of days. Some original projections were quickly at the edge of earlier uncertainty bands that were apparently not sufficiently wide.

Interestingly, though, if you take a meta view of models the extreme outlier models are likely to have been wrong (we are unlikely to see 2 million deaths as the worst models predicted, and we already have more deaths than the most benign models predicted).  My guess is that we will probably land on the low end or slightly below the range of the original IHME model, which predicted 100 - 240,000 deaths, but probably a bit above their revised model of 60,000 deaths.

If you assume we've hit a peak, and as burger notes, we follow a slow linear decline in deaths as Italy did, then you can do some crude estimates.  Starting at an average of about 2000 deaths per day since April 8 (it has been pretty steady), if the daily death toll goes down linearly over the next two months (by about 33/day), you would get ~60,000 deaths between now and mid-June, which gets us to about 100,000 total deaths.

BC