Trump promises us “It will disappear — like a miracle, it will disappear.” but only after there are many more deaths filling Yankee stadium.
On 4 May, CEA decided to tweet some nonsense about “curve-fitting” the latest COVID death projections, at which the Twitterverse was subsequently merciless. Some folks dragged the current CEA’s faulty data visualization because stegosaurus:
Kevin Hassett is the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Larry Kudlow is the chair of the National Economic Council, and Jared Kushner headed the secret taskforce behind the official COVID Taskforce. They’ve all said stupid stuff about the pandemic, baffling us further as Trump insists we should forget the death toll and help reelect him.
The plot is just about confusing us with greater feats of disinformation. At the end we wonder whether Trump's Council of Economic Advisers is stupider than Larry Kudlow's National Economic Council.
How happy can happy talk economics be in a Trump White House? Or did Hassett, as a Kushner “volunteer” hidden in an office at FEMA, give Kushner a model to demonstrate that he failed his MBA statistics course at NYU. It does explain the dogged ignorance of Trump insisting that the pandemic would not affect the US during his missing month(s) of golf, rallies, and fundraisers.
The Kevin Hassett model for the WH predicts all national COVID-19 deaths will end on 15 May, which doesn’t speak well for the current CEA example below. You may not want to take that model to the local casino, but you might bring the IHME model that predicts 135,000 deaths by 1 August. And then there’s the model that predicts 200k deaths by 1 June.
Now imagine how curve-fitting for these models might not be all that predictive, because interpolation is not extrapolation. And at present you're talking about filling up Yankee Stadium with death! That same guy believes that it will go to zero (because everyone will be dead).
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 5, 2020
“The President’s phased guidelines to open up America again are a scientific driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with. The health of the American people remains President Trump’s top priority, and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions.”A spokeswoman for the CDC said the agency did not issue the projections.The forecast is at odds with remarks made Sunday evening by Trump, who said the United States could eventually suffer as many as 100,000 deaths. At 3,000 deaths per day and rising, the national total would quickly outstrip that number if the new report is correct.A senior White House official said the document would not change the White House planning on reopening.White House officials have been relying on other models to make decisions on reopening, including the IHME model and a “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett and the Council of Economic Advisers.[…]
On Monday, however, the IHME model — widely used by states and heavily relied upon in the past by the White House — also revised its deaths significantly upward to reflect the reopenings in several states.The IHME model — created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — is now estimating that the United States will reach nearly 135,000 deaths by August 1. That number is significantly higher than its mid-April estimate of 60,308 deaths.The IHME’s new higher projections “reflect the effect of premature relaxation of restrictions,” said its creator Christopher Murray. “In this era where those mandates are being relaxed, people should be aware the risk of infection is still there.”The number of deaths estimated by the IHME model by June 1 is still much lower than those in the draft government report. But the IHME model is considered among the more optimistic projections.[…]
Even more optimistic than that, however, is the “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett. People with knowledge of that model say it shows deaths dropping precipitously in May — and essentially going to zero by May 15.
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) May 5, 2020
— Brian Bohman (@bjbohman) May 5, 2020
— Aspiring nihiloptimist (@tryingoptimism) May 5, 2020
And then there’s a reality…
