[acqq]

The study was made by

"The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)" launched in 2007 "with the goal of providing an impartial, evidence-based picture of global health trends to inform the work of policymakers, researchers, and funders. Main supporters are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of Washington."

Edit: once I read the claim "That methodology looks extremely dodgy" or "doesn't make it right" (in the answer below) I'd expect some specific information which would support that claim. Especially when the same person writes "you" to the poster posting the link to the study of an independent institute residing at the University of Washington.

[danielharan]

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.

[dhimes]

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.

If you have a better way to do it please share.

[danielharan]

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.

[dhimes]

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.

[mmmrtl]

How could the US possibly beat these numbers? Do you imagine shutdowns more severe than Wuhan happening here?

[acqq]

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.

[dhimes]

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.