[yamtaddle]

How've I not noticed this? I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever and lots and lots of people in positions of authority who seem totally unable to extrapolate from those in their heads, resulting in idiotic back-and-forth on various restrictions for the first 18 or so months of the pandemic.

Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy.

But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those?

[EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true.

[EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.

[jryhjythtr]

Sounds like you're in the UK. Do you consume any mainstream media?

https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+predictions&tbm=isc...

I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.

[lazyasciiart]

My guess is a tone issue. It’s hard to even tell that you’re saying you haven’t seen long term graphs - the first sentence comes across as sarcastic when followed by long sentences complaining about other problems.

[yamtaddle]

I thought:

> I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever

made it pretty clear, but maybe not. And the rest was expressing that the actual on-the-ground problem I saw, and the single biggest problem with my state & local-level response to the whole thing, was a complete lack of attention to future trends, not too much. But perhaps that doesn't come across very well. Mea Culpa.