At least with essential workers—if you can define the scope narrowly—there's an argument to be had about reaching herd immunity sooner. What will literally kill people is treating a broad set of preexisting conditions as being as important as age.
If you look at the research, virtually all of people at highest risk of dying from COVID are aged 70+. There are almost no preexisting conditions that matter remotely as much as age.
But ACIP defines *more than 100m people* as having "high-risk medical conditions" that put them in the same priority tier as people age 65+ for vaccination. This is NOT following the science. States that want to save lives must give age higher priority. cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/…
There's going to be a **lot** of this happening if you define a very broad set of preexisting conditions as deserving higher priority for vaccines. It's a huge, avoidable mistake.
As @Neil_Paine talks about here, we also made a couple of important changes to our NBA projections this year. I'm going to simplify this a bit, but basically it comes down to PLAYER-BASED projections vs. TEAM-BASED projections.
In the past, we've really used two ways to project NBA games. One is TEAM-BASED solely using team performance, e.g. via Elo ratings.
Advantage: captures team "intangibles" (coaching, cohesion, recent form)
Big disadvantage: doesn't account for player personnel changes. 2/
Alternatively, PLAYER-BASED projections work by summing up the projections for individual players, e.g. by using our RAPTOR ratings. That is, team performance is assumed to be ~equal to the sum of the parts. This has the opposite set of strengths and weaknesses. 3/
The chances that the election would be close enough that late-arriving ballots in PA would be enough to change the overall outcome was maybe something like 0.5% or 1%. (There were not many of these ballots.) So if that's what people were concerned about, it was overblown.
When I pointed out though that yes the Supreme Court could determine the result in a *very* close election but it would likely have to be very close indeed under certain specific scenarios, I got yelled at on this platform for not taking the chances seriously enough.
If you want to take the position that the election aftermath went even worse than expected in some ways, but better than expected in other ways—including the Supreme Court—that seems reasonable and prudent! It's imperative to take stock of what happened.
This seems like a fairly realistic set of assumptions for what to expect on the COVID-19 front next year as vaccinations begin to roll out. Things start to get notably better by ~April but it takes until mid-to-late summer before we approach herd immunity. covid19-projections.com/path-to-herd-i…
The one major downside scenario is if vaccines prevent disease but don't do much to curb *infection*. Otherwise though these seem like pretty middle-of-the-road assumptions. I think he may underplay the role of seasonality a bit, which could help in the summer.
The other thing that seems likely is there will be some pretty fierce debates in that interim period from April-July or so about faster or slower paths to reopening.
I'd also note, in general, that there have been a lot of bad predictions from liberals when it comes to how the Supreme Court would behave. Every court term, including this most recent one, brings a major "surprise" ruling or two. It's been a blind spot for analysis.
Some of it may be that while it may be the Supreme Court has become more partisan, it's not nearly at the same hyperwarp speed at which Congress has become more partisan, so it provides an important constraint overall.
One perhaps-not-terrible heuristic is to think of the current SCOTUS as being.... Mitt Romney. It's certainly quite conservative and doesn't remotely endorse the liberal worldview. But it's not particularly partisan or Trumpist and it cares about its institutional legacy.
There's a lot of "if it were closer or X and Y were different, SCOTUS would have stolen the election for Trump" in response to this, to which I have a few different responses:
a) Maybe! But this election was *pretty* close and the courts were *very* unsympathetic to Trump. What if it was Florida-in-2000 close? So close it wasn't clear who really won? Maybe that's different. But Florida was INCREDIBLY close, a once-in-several-lifetimes occurrence.
b) Here's a litmus test. Suppose on Nov. 2 I'd described the outcome of the election—Biden would win 4 key states by <=1 point, all of which have GOP legislatures and two of which have GOP governors, one of whom is Brian Kemp. Would liberals have been freaking out? (Yes.)
These are just polling averages, FYI. We are not issuing probabilistic forecasts of the Georgia runoffs, not for any philosophical reason—they'll be back in 2022/24—but because our full-fledged Congressional model isn't really designed to handle one-off races like these.
To be honest that's probably for the best, because there are a lot of judgment calls in terms of what the "fundamentals" look like in this election. Is this equivalent to a midterm, in which you might expect a pretty red environment vs. Biden? Maybe not given how Trump is acting.