Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I was under the impression that the original 2 million+ estimate out of London did consider mitigation. What good would a model be if it did not incorporate a (guaranteed) change of behavior when anticipating death projections of that magnitude.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge on this model can clarify. I am unable to find the original paper.
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https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
I feel like I have to post this every week. Clearly the media has done an awful job reporting on this. The whole point of the paper is to evaluate different mitigation strategies! There's a scenario in the paper with only 5,600 deaths in the UK.
The model did not attempt to predict what people and governments would actually do. What good would a model be if it could perfectly predict the future? That would mean there is no free will.
Also if people actually read the paper they would see that they agree with your point:
In addition, the impact of many of the NPIs detailed here depends critically on how people respond to their introduction, which is highly likely to vary between countries and even communities. Last, it is highly likely that there would be significant spontaneous changes in population behaviour even in the absence of government-mandated interventions.
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