Killing the curve in Pakistan: Why models failed.

This is not a miracle. This is the result of targeted interventions by the State, which understood the properties of the problem at hand and designed policies accordingly.

1/n https://www.brecorder.com/news/40009403/killing-the-curve-in-pakistan-how-models-failed-why-targeted-interventions-worked

An inherent weakness of statistical models is the representative agent, where a diverse population w/ multitude of factors is clubbed as a monolithic entity. Models which providing doomsday predictions assumed the population to be a monolithic entity, which was not the case

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CO-19 spreads through networks, w/ greater connectivity resulting in the higher spread. Models assumed uniform connectivity, whether someone was a frequent traveler or someone who had never stepped foot outside his village – both were assumed to have similar connectedness.

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As disease spread through prosperous & urban areas of PK, rest of the country could not figure what the hoopla was all about. Review of testing & death data per 100k population exhibits that ISB, KHI South, KHI Central, KHI East & Lahore had the highest # of cases & deaths

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Ramp-up in # of cases after Eid-ul-Fitr demonstrated that spread was largely restricted to a few urban hotspots, which could be filtered and tackled through direct interventions.

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The gov. through targeted interventions, and by avoiding cookie-cutter models imported from more prosperous (and aged) jurisdictions, not only flattened the proverbial curve but also killed it.

This is no miracle. This is intervention which played out, and killed the curve

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