This is from the latest Imperial College report. They project that, even in the best case scenario, the daily number of deaths at the peak would be ~3 times as high as before vaccination in the absence of new restrictions or behavioral changes 🙃 imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-inf… 
It's the same thing every time: take the VOC's initial growth advantage, turn that into a *transmissibility* advantage, plug that into a model that assumes quasi-homogeneous mixing with no behavioral changes and, congratulations, you got yourself a nice apocalyptic prediction!
My bad, you must insist that it's not a prediction but a *projection* (as if the reason why it has zero chance of coming true were because of scenario uncertainty and not model misspecification 🤪), so that when it doesn't happen you can say that your *projection* wasn't wrong...
I'm sorry but anyone who pretends not to understand that this is complete nonsense is either a moron or a liar. But I don't believe the ICL folks are morons, so this is 100% bullshit, politically motivated modeling, meant to pressure the government into implementing restrictions.
At this point, it's impossible they are so stupid as not to understand that this stuff is bullshit, so what they do is release those projections (making some caveats to cover their asses which they know full well will be ignored by the media) to put the heat on the government.
Sadly, even though I know for a fact (some of them email me you know...) that many epidemiologists understand that very well, they will either not say it because it's bad for their career or, in the rare cases when they do, they will just be ignored or demonized by the media.
I wish a journalist in a prominent outlet would explain that stuff in terms that are understandable by the educated public. It's totally doable and frankly it has to be done, because the instrumentalization of bullshit modeling during this crisis has been absolutely outrageous.
This is what I'm talking about: they make all sorts of caveats in the paper to cover their asses, but they know full well this pointless exercise will result in this sort of headlines, and they know very well what the political effect of those headlines will be 🤷♂️
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