The SARS-CoV-2 transmission riddle - Part 5

Model methods are black boxes, their limits are not explained, the data they are based on are highly suspect, and their predictions do not translate into everyday life - but all the rest is fine

Cast your mind back to the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic. Do you remember when initial caution gave way to panic, and TV experts competed to prophesize doom and gloom? 

Uncertainty compelled the experts to apply the precautionary principle. At the very beginning, you have to hastily ramp up the threat - despite not knowing how many people would be seriously affected or hospitalised- before anyone finds it out.   

Most  - if not all - of the early scenarios offered were based on gazes into the future “behaviour” of a hitherto unknown agent: SARS-CoV-2. Models and modelling were (and still are) the primary decision-making tool in these circumstances.

So we thought we should ask what the possible reasons why these predictions, and countless before, did not materialise are. 

Uncertainty seems a fair starting point:  Dr Edgar Hope-Simpson, a UK GP,  had shown half a century before that viral respiratory disease epidemics can start with an explosive phase that peters out relatively soon a…