Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Lucky Guesses: Some Guy Who Predicted the Peak In Chinese Covid-19 Cases and Deaths Says We'll Be Fine

From the Los Angeles Times, March 23:
....Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus’ rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.

This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths — in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.....
Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.
Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.....
....MUCH MORE

Here's another of those Stanford peeps last Friday:
"A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data"