Dont Believe the COVID-19 Models – The Atlantic

So if epidemiological models dont give us certaintyand asking them to do so would be a big mistakewhat good are they? Epidemiology gives us something more important: agency to identify and calibrate our actions with the goal of shaping our future. We can do this by pruning catastrophic branches of a tree of possibilities that lies before us.

Epidemiological models have tailsthe extreme ends of the probability spectrum. Theyre called tails because, visually, they are the parts of the graph that taper into the distance. Think of those tails as branches in a decision tree. In most scenarios, we end up somewhere in the middle of the treethe big bulge of highly probable outcomesbut there are a few branches on the far right and the far left that represent fairly optimistic and fairly pessimistic, but less likely, outcomes. An optimistic tail projection for the COVID-19 pandemic is that a lot of people might have already been infected and recovered, and are now immune, meaning we are putting ourselves through a too-intense quarantine. Some people have floated that as a likely scenario, and they are not crazy: This is indeed a possibility, especially given that our testing isnt widespread enough to know. The other tail includes the catastrophic possibilities, like tens of millions of people dying, as in the 1918 flu or HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Read: The curve is not flat enough

The most important function of epidemiological models is as a simulation, a way to see our potential futures ahead of time, and how that interacts with the choices we make today. With COVID-19 models, we have one simple, urgent goal: to ignore all the optimistic branches and that thick trunk in the middle representing the most likely outcomes. Instead, we need to focus on the branches representing the worst outcomes, and prune them with all our might. Social isolation reduces transmission, and slows the spread of the disease. In doing so, it chops off branches that represent some of the worst futures. Contact tracing catches people before they infect others, pruning more branches that represent unchecked catastrophes.

At the beginning of a pandemic, we have the disadvantage of higher uncertainty, but the advantage of being early: The costs of our actions are lower because the disease is less widespread. As we prune the tree of the terrible, unthinkable branches, we are not just choosing a path; we are shaping the underlying parameters themselves, because the parameters themselves are not fixed. If our hospitals are not overrun, we will have fewer deaths and thus a lower fatality rate. Thats why we shouldnt get bogged down in litigating a models numbers. Instead we should focus on the parameters we can change, and change them.

Every time the White House releases a COVID-19 model, we will be tempted to drown ourselves in endless discussions about the error bars, the clarity around the parameters, the wide range of outcomes, and the applicability of the underlying data. And the media might be tempted to cover those discussions, as this fits their horse-race, he-said-she-said scripts. Lets not. We should instead look at the calamitous branches of our decision tree and chop them all off, and then chop them off again.

Sometimes, when we succeed in chopping off the end of the pessimistic tail, it looks like we overreacted. A near miss can make a model look false. But thats not always what happened. It just means we won. And thats why we model.

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Dont Believe the COVID-19 Models - The Atlantic