Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Explain this - the idea of social distancing is to flatten the curve, yes? And in flattening the curve, you lower the peak. Agreed?
Yet universally, in EVERY one of those models, the consensus was that by flattening the curve and lowering the peak, you push said peak out. Because of course you do, that's how mitigation operates.
And yet the peaks are moving in. MASSIVELY. By over a month in Missouri. Nothing about higher rates of social distancing would've caused that. Sure, it might yield lower overall figures but it wouldn't simply rush the peak forward by several weeks.
You fellas are so eager to take these guys at face value that it just blows my mind. Yeah, I'm sure the explanation they give, which just so happens to reinforce the thing they said to do anyway, was the right one. Nevermind the fact that there's an internal logical failure to it. Even when they showed 'social distancing vs. no social distancing' in their own models, the lowered peak was always further out. There was never an argument that any amount of social distancing, 20%, 50% or 100% would move the peak in.
This is the "I care too much" of interview answers. "We were just TOO right, guys. We knew how important social distancing was and look, the fact that we were off by enormous numbers even at the BOTTOM of our uncertainty curves just proves how right we were!!!" Oh, and the fact that we saw in real time that social distancing was going along at rates far higher than 50% for over a week, 'updated' our model twice in that period of time and STILL couldn't get within 1/4 of our claimed figures....nah, don't worry about that little guy.
FFS. Y'all shit on any study that uses SARS or MERS as a baseline yet the Imperial College model was nothing BUT an recycled SARS model. And it assumed total social distancing in its best case scenario (Ferguson swore by that when he was preaching his gloom and doom) - shockingly, the IMHE model tracked right along with it.
And now you're just taking their justifications, ones that just happen to make them look good despite being catastrophically wrong, at face value and assuming these kindly scientists and mathematicians who will absolutely be using their 'performance' as a basis for grants, etc... had clearly pure motives as they were rushing models to the front with literally no reliable real-world data.
Sure guys - you were just too damn right. Thank you, oh noble 'experts'. You've proven your worth in spades throughout this thing.
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