The Covid model that 'keeps being wrong'

This coronavirus model keeps being wrong. Why are we still listening to it? Vox - Kelsey Piper: 

May 2, 2020 - "How many people are likely to die in the United States of Covid-19? How many hospital beds is the country going to need? When will case numbers peak? To answer those questions, many hospital planners, media outlets, and government bodies — including the White House — relied heavily on one particular model out of the many that have been published in the past two months: the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

"The model first estimated in late March that there’d be fewer than 161,000 deaths total in the US; in early April, it revised its projections to say the total death toll through August was projected to be 60,415 (though it acknowledged the range could be between 31,221 and 126,703). 

"The model has been cited often by the White House and has informed its policymaking. But it may have led the administration astray: The IHME has consistently forecast many fewer deaths than most other models, largely because the IHME model projects that deaths will decline rapidly after the peak — an assumption that has not been borne out.

"On Wednesday [April 29], the US death count passed the 60,000 mark that the IHME model had said was the likely total cumulative death toll. The IHME on April 29 released a new update raising its estimates for total deaths to 72,433, but that, too, looks likely to be proved an underestimate as soon as next week. Even its upper bound on deaths — now listed as 114,228 by August — is questionable, as some other models expect the US will hit that milestone by the end of May, and most project it will in June. [U.S. figures showed 110,000 deaths by June 1 - gd]

"One analysis of the IHME model found that its next-day death predictions for each state were outside its 95 percent confidence interval 70 percent of the time — meaning the actual death numbers fell outside the range it projected 70 percent of the time.... This track record has led some experts to criticize the model. 'It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited' to making projections about Covid-19, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told reporters.... Yet it’s the IHME model that has generally guided policymakers, for the most part, in the direction of focusing on a return to normal....

"The criticism of the IHME model, and an emerging debate over epidemiology models more broadly, has brought to light important challenges in the fight against the coronavirus. Good planning requires good projections. Models are needed to help predict resurgences and spot a potential second wave. Dissecting what the IHME model got wrong, what other models got right, and how the public and policymakers read these models is essential work in order to create the best pandemic plans possible....

"Models usually lay out some foundational assumptions and offer projections based on those assumptions. The IHME model seeks to project death rates and hospitalization rates assuming widespread social distancing and strong measures to prevent the spread of the virus. But as the weeks have passed, it has become clear that the IHME’s projections have been too optimistic, and slow to adjust to reflect the fact that deaths have plateaued rather than rapidly decreasing to zero. The IHME has been regularly updating its model as new data comes in, but the updates have often been slow enough that the numbers are absurd by the time they’re changed in an update. For example, in late April the model still stated the expected total death toll was 60,000, even as the US was clearly only a few days from that milestone.

"[IHME researcher Ali Mokdad] Mokdad told me when we talked that a fix was in the works, and it went up a few days later: The model now projects 73,433 deaths by August. That, too, is probably an underestimate — most other models project that total will be reached next week." [U.S. figures showed over 188,000 deaths by August 30 - gd]

Read more: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/2/21241261/coronavirus-modeling-us-deaths-ihme-pandemic

Inaccurate modelling led to care home deaths

How the Gates Foundation seeded America's COVID-19 policy catastrophes | The Dossier - Jordan Schachtel

February 16, 2021 - "New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and criminally negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths — and the coverup campaigns — of tens of thousands of senior citizens in New York and elsewhere across the United States.... Cuomo ... is far from the only governor who executed the 'nursing home death warrants.' Governor Cuomo was accompanied by the governors of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere.

"The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling 'experts' at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months.... 

"On two separate April 1 and April 2 press conferences, Cuomo made clear that his policy decisions were based off of the IHME model. 'There is a group that is funded by the Gates Foundation. Thank you very much Bill Gates,' Cuomo said on April 1 in discussing ICU needs and how he was using Gates models to make other healthcare policy decisions. 'There's only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,' Cuomo said on April 2, adding, 'and we thank the Gates Foundation for the national service that they've done.'

"In an April 9 briefing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer referred to the IHME model in order to project deaths and the PPE resources needed for the supposed surge. It was the same story with the government of Pennsylvania. The PA Health Department exclusively uses IHME models to forecast coronavirus outcomes. Governor Phil Murphy, another nursing home death warrant participant, used IHME models to navigate the state’s policy response. 

"It wasn’t just state governors relying on this data; federal bureaucrats Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both of whom have substantial ties to the Gates network, used the IHME COVID-19 forecasting models (which Birx endorsed specifically as the best prediction modeling outfit) to make policy recommendations to states. In her White House briefings, Birx, who simultaneously had a seat on the board of a Gates-funded institution, almost exclusively relied on IHME models to project outcomes.... 

"These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants. States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created 'surge capacity' pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. 

"IHME, for its part, regularly 'adjusts' its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes. Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized 'health metrics' forecasting organization.... Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest 'crisis' that is climate change."

Read more: https://dossier.substack.com/p/how-the-gates-foundation-seeded-americas