08-12-2021, 12:04 PM
Modeling is as reliable as the assumptions you build into them, which is to say that they are essentially pure guesswork. I do modelling (of the financial variety) as part of my work and a small tweak to the inputs/assumptions can make a huge difference to the resulting predictions. Which is great when you need the modelling to arrive at a specific answer, but makes them nest to useless as a genuine predictive tool.
Almost all of the Covid related modelling (cases, deaths, hospitalisations, ICU utilisation etc.) has proven to have been wildly overblown. All of the NZ government's go-to modelers seem to be associated with/use the work of Imperial College London/Neil Ferguson, who has an abysmal track record of predicting or modeling pandemic outcomes.
Almost all of the Covid related modelling (cases, deaths, hospitalisations, ICU utilisation etc.) has proven to have been wildly overblown. All of the NZ government's go-to modelers seem to be associated with/use the work of Imperial College London/Neil Ferguson, who has an abysmal track record of predicting or modeling pandemic outcomes.