That really doesn't answer the question. That methodology looks extremely dodgy, and merely having funding from the Gates foundation doesn't make it right.
It's curve-fitting. By real epidemiologists. It's not just based on Wuhan, but based on knowledge of how things like this spread. Wuhan fit the model, so there's hope.
But it's just curve-fitting. And it depends on certain things, like people being smart. You get your parameters from what you observe.
They're getting flack from other epidemiologists for doing just that. Curve-fitting the AIDS epidemic suggested it would peter out in 1995.
We only have the same curves if we put in the same restrictions as Wuhan, or get R down as much. Yet we still have megachurches holding services.
And politicians are using these as worst-case scenarios already, which will make them complacent about the urgent need for more ventilators, masks and PPE supplies.
They answer all that in the paper. It's not predicting behavior of people- we can still do stupid things and make this a lot worse.
But if we behave and practice social distancing and don't do stupid things, this is the estimate we have today (or a couple of days ago) of the timeline.
If I were a leader of the United States, I would challenge the population to beat these numbers.
More worrying is that a lockdown that started recently will not be reflected immediately in any statistics -- it takes time for that. If I understand correctly, the lockdown of Wuhan started as they reported only 23 deaths and was more drastic than any other. The growth in cases however continued afterwards for around a month.
Some of the things they did initially were counterproductive; isolating carriers is actually much better than sending them home to infect family. I saw figure of 75% of cases being transmitted by close contacts.
All that said, the math is brutal and you're right about things not being immediately apparent in the statistics. There's a delay for symptoms, and then another for deaths.
Unless another country epicly fubars their response, the USA should maintain its #1 spot. All the more so if states don't encourage social distancing for another week.
I'm thinking of a challenge more like Sweden rather than an enforced lockdown. Make it a competition- a race to the moon. What happens in Sweden remains to be seen though.
More interesting to me is that we have a measure by which we can evaluate our leader's response. Deaths well north of 200K means he severely screwed up.
Of course we'll never convince his base of that should it come to pass.
And to be fair, if he keeps the number of deaths in the 100K range then he will have done a good job from the point at which he started taking action.
We shouldn't let him anchor to those numbers. More than 10k is already a catastrophe, and difficult to justify given the advance warning.
Everything in excess of that is a shocking mix of incompetence, hubris and malice - including refusing help to states whose governors aren't sufficiently deferential.
