This is popping up everywhere as an example of an expert getting a prediction laughably wrong.

Make no mistake, it IS laughably wrong - today.

But you have to consider what this tweet was saying back then, not now, and when you do that, it's not laughable at all. /1 https://twitter.com/SamuelMcConkey1/status/1305579552966676482

The tweet was written on September 14th.

3 population-level interventions were implemented since this tweet was written:

-Level 3 imposed in Dublin, September 18th
-Level 3 imposed in Ireland, October 6th
-Level 5 imposed in Ireland, October 21st

Tweet projected 5,000 cases a day in Dublin alone at the end of October with no intervention.

That is a considerable distance from Irelands 1,283 cases peak notified on October 18th and obviously leaves him wide open to mockery.

But there were interventions.

3 of them.

Lets rewind to when this tweet was written.

Here are a few of the 14-day incidences per 100,000 on September 14th:

Czech Republic: 111.0
Belgium: 70.6
Netherlands: 65.8
Northern Ireland: 60.9
Ireland: 50.0
Slovenia: 40.2

Most under 100.0 with Czech's slightly over.

14-day incidences per 100,000 today, October 26th:

Czech Republic: 1,323.8
Belgium: 1,301.2
Northern Ireland: 743.0
Slovenia: 686.5
Netherlands: 674.0
Ireland: 307.5

I selected smaller countries that didn't implement population-level restrictions as early as Ireland did.

Now lets look at the highest daily cases reached in all 6 countries:

Belgium: 17,709 (October 25th)
Czech Republic: 15,252 (October 24th)
Netherlands: 10,202 (October 25th)
Slovenia: 1,967 (October 24th)
Northern Ireland: 1,299 (October 16th)
Ireland: 1,283 (October 18th)

When you break that down per capita, record Daily Cases controlled for Ireland's population:

Belgium: 7,835
Czech Republic: 6,748
Slovenia: 4,917
Northern Ireland: 3,377
Netherlands: 2,857
Ireland: 1,283

Belgium is near-certain to go considerably higher again.

Predicting 5,000 cases a day in Dublin with no intervention looks very stupid now, after multiple interventions.

But Belgium practically reached an ~ 8,000 equivalent nationally and from there you have to consider is it possible for Dublin to have 63% of cases on any given day.

The day the tweet was written, Dublin accounted for 56% of Ireland's cases. 116 out of 208.

56% of Belgium's per capita peak of 7,835 is getting close to 5,000 cases (4,400).

So all of this was very possible, with no intervention.

Practically possible, not just theoretically.

Public Health experts make forecasts that always end up too high.

The reason is most Governments won't allow it to get to that level without staging interventions.

The ones that didn't intervene, showed the situation easily could have gone bananas in Ireland too.

It takes courage of convictions for Infectious Disease specialists to make models public because they are almost always *badly wrong* after Governments intervene.

But Belgian epidemiologists predicted all of this - and were *dead right* - because their Government failed to act.

Sam was 100% correct to be alarmed at Ireland's trajectory on September 14th.

Just look over the border for proof of that.

We should give all of the credit to Irish society for changing that trajectory, rather than doing this at the modelers: