I try to refrain from tweeting about topics I know nothing about, but I had made the same reflection. But I also think that the problems facing epidemiologists are similar to those faced by economists. First, there is the problem of forecasting with problematic data /
For instance, one thing that has become very clear now is that, without systematic testing of people without symptoms, you have no idea of what is going on, or rather that your idea of what is going on is based on biased data. /
This is a problem economists are well familiar with: people laugh with economists not being able to forecast recessions, but I remember recessions that had started or were finished before it showed in the statistics. A second problem arises when the evolution of a /
phenomenon through time is non linear, but you have to forecast it, based on data that are still compatible with a linear trend. A lot of fun has been made of people not understanding exponential laws, but please keep in mind that, for most of their domain, exponential /
functions are empirically equivalent with horizontal or vertical linear functions. Third, in both epidemiology and economics, people react to communication about the outcomes of models, which can lead to selfdenying or selffulfilling prophecies. (The end)
