[easde]

Not just masks. Early projections (March / April) by supposedly reputable groups like IHME were wildly inaccurate. Even a cursory reading of their methods showed that they had no idea what they were doing. Oversimplifying a bit, they were fitting the CDF of a Gaussian to the cumulative deaths over time. Not a reasonable way of modeling exponential growth.

Nevertheless, IHME was kept in the spotlight by the government and media because they deemed the experts as an independent health research center at a reputable university. Their predictions drove many poor policy decisions, culminating in the infamous claim by Trump that the pandemic would be over soon after Easter. Many epidemiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians etc. called their conclusions into question and built better models (mostly using SEIR / SEIS). It took several more months for IHME to improve their own model, but by then the damage was already done.

[tomjen3]

Shit, I wasn't even aware of that one. It is so spectacularly stupid I almost think it is a more logical explanation that it is an inside job, surely nobody can be that stupid, right? I mean I am just a computer programmer but I know what exponential growth is and what it looks like.