4 weeks ago there was tons of media coverage of "leaked White House projections" that supposedly showed deaths rising to 3K/day and cases to 200K/day by today. As I said, these projections never made sense and shouldn't have been treated so credulously. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1257341071949955074?s=20

What actually happened? We've averaged 942 deaths and 21K cases per day over the past week (via @COVID19Tracking). So way off from those supposed projections.

But here's the thing: this isn't a surprise. The actual numbers have been very close to the true expert consensus.

In fact, the number of deaths through the end of the month almost exactly matched what the consensus of expert models expected on May 4. But those models got little attention in the media.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/?ex_cid=rrpromo

Hard to think of a better way to facilitate complacency and undermine trust in experts than to constantly emphasize worst-case outcomes and treat them as though they're the base case.

Usually the worst case doesn't come to pass. But the actual outcomes can still be very bad.