Difficult to Comprehend

Took a ride
I went downtown
The streets were empty
There was no one around
--Plimsouls

Infectious disease epidemiologists employ hypothetical models to forecast outcomes from the spread of infections. These models narrowly focus on direct outcomes of the disease (e.g., number of infections, number of deaths) depending on whether countermeasures or no countermeasures are employed.

Not only can these models produce spectacularly wrong predictions of the direct effects of infectious disease spread, but they ignore the costs associated with implementing various countermeasures--particularly, ironically enough,  health costs associated with draconian policies certain to upset the lives of millions for protracted time periods.

This side of the forecast would likely be more accurate, as it is well known that one of the most predictive factors associated with public health is economic prosperity. When economies grow, collective health does too.

More people are waking up to the fact that models that have 'informed' policymakers during the current crisis have disregarded the consequences of countermeasures on public health. In this article, an MD and three b-school profs use past research and current evidence to estimate that millions of human life years will be lost in the US alone due to the countermeasures already implemented to 'slow the spread' of COVID-19.

Almost certainly, the cure will be far worse than the disease.

The authors rightly conclude that future policy-making must be informed by a more inclusive analysis than that being conducted by a single class of epidemiological 'experts.'

Adding a forecast cost of countermeasures to a forecasting model should be a straightforward endeavor given the voluminous supporting research. Indeed, why current models lack more comprehensiveness is difficult to...comprehend.