Whose Coronavirus Projections Should We Believe?

A physicist friend who has been pondering the coronavirus numbers emails to share his frustration:

Knowing that the Gaussian has a peak doesn’t tell you when it happens or how big it is. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find out how variable coronoviruses are but not successfully. So it isn’t clear if the flu model, evolving toward a milder strain, is applicable.

I fucking hate biology. In physics, if you know the past, you can predict the future. There are well formulated, deterministic laws (even quantum laws). Everything in biology is contingent. In retrospect, you can see what caused what, but natural selection is not predictive. It depends on the vagaries of both mutation and predation. Unquantifiable quantities make a physicist scream “Yarbles!”

Quite so. And I happened to run into a great example of this today. As you know, researchers at Imperial College recently released a report with projections about the spread of coronavirus in Britain and the US. Today, the New York Times wrote about one from Columbia University. Here are the most relevant charts:

These are not directly comparable. However, the Times chart is pretty easy to convert to total cases (about 20 million), and from there to total deaths. Using the current consensus estimate of 1 percent for the case fatality rate, the total number of deaths comes to 200,000 by the end of summer in the absence of control measures (red line). The Imperial College chart directly projects 2.2 million deaths by the end of summer in the absence of control measures.

Obviously we are putting in place control measures, so these are not real-life projections. My reason for showing them is that they’re the easiest to compare and they aren’t even in the same ballpark. They’re more than 10x apart. It’s the difference between only 6 percent of the country becoming infected vs. two-thirds or more becoming infected.¹

Unless I did my sums wrong—always a possibility—this leaves us lay folks with nothing to do but shake our heads. Who do we believe?

¹This is the core reason that the Imperial College study has such a high death estimate. Their model projects that 82 percent of the country will eventually be infected, which is a higher projection than most other studies I’ve seen.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

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Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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