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I don't know who needs to hear this, but projections and predictions are not the same thing.
I'm starting to think that this whole fomenting frustration about the models being wrong is the result of the media taking complex PROJECTIONS with multiple potential outcomes and just running with apocalyptic headlines about PREDICTIONS.
And atypically for me I'm not even going to pin this on the media. When nitty gritty scientists and number crunchers meet lay reporters in an emergency situation and a highly polarized political atmosphere, stuff like this happens.
So the epidemiologist says "here are several scenarios that we can project from existing data. If we do X, Y, and Z it could help but there are trillions of variables and the best we can do is make every effort to mitigate and see how that impacts it" but the media turns it into:
EPIDEMIOLOGISTS SAY UP TO 2 MILLION AMERICANS COULD DIE and maybe throw in a gratuitous DUE TO TRUMP'S UTTER FAILURES. Add to that many other factors such as potentially highballing deaths because you can't play footsie with a pandemic and assume the best will happen.
This all makes light years more sense than the idea that there is some evil at play here, especially since I've already seen opposite claims over the same data: They faked it to crash the economy and hurt Trump. They faked it so when fewer people die Trump looks good...
I'm not exactly seeing the world epidemiologists lining up to discredit the work Fauci and Birx are doing. Ultimately a post-mortem of the data is what will tell the truth. It's like how some things about 9/11 seemed fishy before full investigations and studies were performed.
For god's sake, for once assume that maybe maybe MAAAAYBE you, the lay person on Twitter, is just out of your depth in terms of what's going on right now. That's certainly the position I'm adopting here. This is mainly Occam's Razor at work.
