
Headlines about coronavirus case counts are worthless - andyljones
https://andyljones.com/posts/headlines.html
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jacquesm
You can take that one step further: all stats about the Coronavirus case
counts are worthless. There is no country that has done a large enough random
antibody test to be able to make a definitive statement about how far the
virus has gone in infecting the population and the speed with which the
situation develops is so high that any published numbers are outdated by the
time they are committed to print or bits.

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andyljones
I don't agree with that. There's a spectrum between information being entirely
uninformative and perfectly informative. Daily case headlines are pretty close
to uninformative on their own, but the underlying case figures, in bulk,
plugged into a model? It's certainly better than sticking your finger in the
air.

Predictions don't have to be perfect to be useful, and while there is a debate
to be had where the threshold is between a prediction that's confident to be
useful and one that isn't, writing _all_ predictions and _all_ stats off
because they're not perfect is a bit extreme.

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jacquesm
That would require uniform reporting requirements between different countries,
would require the healthcare system not to be so overloaded that they are not
going to be able to comply with their reporting duties and so on. Sticking
your finger in the air may actually be the preferred method.

A model's outputs can only ever be as good as its inputs. If you want to base
your policy on what is effectively random noise then you are going to be wrong
no matter what.

