There are a couple parts to the "getting it right" part.
One is seeing that exponential growth is involved. The second is seeing the fatality statistics are going to much more reliable than test results and that fatality statistics are effectively delayed 2-3 weeks for the virus to incubate.
With this, Tomas Pueyo laid out the case as well as anyone but these numbers are easy to get, why all the listed people were saying this. If you didn't get, sorry about that, it's a failure on a problem no harder than an advanced undergraduate modeling class final. The situation was obvious to that degree of obvious - which I think is much more obvious than the likelihood of most moderately common events in modern society.
And further, I'd claim there aren't many places in the world where you can see exponential growth stopping - certainly not in deaths in the US - 1000 death in NYC today. US cases have slowed their growth 'cause US testing is once again a mess. Even California doesn't have much evidence of a peak and reasonable evidence exponential continues. So maybe Italy, Spain, South Korea, China and Washington state are not experiencing exponential. And that's not comforting.
And you're wrong about the article - it definitely says the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong 'cause they did.
Well, when I wrote https://is.gd/2019nCoV there weren't a lot of fatality statistics yet, precisely because of the delay you mention. I could argue that that's part of why my predictions were so wrong, but I knew that the test results were pretty unreliable. When Tomas wrote his article a month and half later, on March 10, there were a lot more statistics available. The world and US situation was extremely obvious at that point, although that didn't stop the New York Times and Vox and Donald Trump and such bullshit factories from continuing to dismiss the problem.
But, ten days after Tomas's article, on March 20, I was still very concerned about a friend in New Zealand whose partner was due to deliver a child in 5 weeks, because New Zealand's confirmed case numbers were growing exponentially at 30% per day, same as they do in every country at first — but, again, it was too early to have any real death statistics for New Zealand. So I projected 5 weeks into the future and predicted the kind of apocalyptic healthcare breakdown we had seen in China and were starting to see in Italy and Spain: hundreds of thousands of confirmed COVID-19 cases overwhelming the healthcare system in New Zealand.
Instead, the exponential growth in New Zealand continued for only another week, and then something stopped it — probably the lockdown measures that were put in place on March 25, although there's still the unlikely possibility of a very large number of asymptomatic cases (as suggested by the recent Stanford preprint) or existing cross-immunity from some less fatal coronavirus. My friend's partner delivered a healthy baby girl a couple of weeks early on April 10, at which point there were only 1283 total confirmed cases in New Zealand, a number growing only 3.6% per day. Currently NZ has 1431 confirmed cases and 12 deaths — worse than Taiwan, but still a shining paragon of pandemic control compared to almost any country in Europe.
So, did I "get things exactly right" when I urged my friend to consult obstetricians about the possibility of inducing labor early, and to get whatever training he could in assisting homebirths in case that was necessary? Certainly I was urging him to prepare for a situation that did not in fact come to pass. Could it have come to pass? Certainly nothing I knew about NZ excluded the possibility or made it very unlikely — perhaps there were things he knew about NZ that excluded the possibility.
I think the best course of action, faced with uncertainties of such enormity, is usually to make preparations that will be unnecessary 90% or 95% of the time — not so much that you will devote the majority of your resources to those preparations, but enough that you are well prepared on the occasions where catastrophe does strike.
But my extrapolation of exponential growth definitely did not come to pass. In that sense, I extrapolated simple exponential growth wrong.
I'm very interested to see what projections for this pandemic you committed to in January and February, since you're saying that what would happen was "exceptionally clear" for you. Where did you post them?
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As for what the epidemiologists said, you literally quoted the part of the article where Alexander claims that "these people [who got things exactly right] didn't necessarily give a higher probability [than the experts [in epidemiology] and prediction markets gave for coronavirus getting really bad]". That is, the epidemiologists gave the same probability distribution over likely outcomes as the "generic smart people who got things exactly right". To me, that reads as exactly the opposite of saying "the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong". And in fact the mainstream epidemiologists, if by that we mean the WHO, declared COVID-19 a "public health emergency of international concern" on January 30th, an action they had taken only five times before in history. Ignorant dilettantes writing articles in Vox or the New York Times, or running the country's government like a reality TV show, are not mainstream epidemiologists.
So, I don't think either the article or objective facts support your thesis that "the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong"; what makes you think otherwise?
One is seeing that exponential growth is involved. The second is seeing the fatality statistics are going to much more reliable than test results and that fatality statistics are effectively delayed 2-3 weeks for the virus to incubate.
With this, Tomas Pueyo laid out the case as well as anyone but these numbers are easy to get, why all the listed people were saying this. If you didn't get, sorry about that, it's a failure on a problem no harder than an advanced undergraduate modeling class final. The situation was obvious to that degree of obvious - which I think is much more obvious than the likelihood of most moderately common events in modern society.
And further, I'd claim there aren't many places in the world where you can see exponential growth stopping - certainly not in deaths in the US - 1000 death in NYC today. US cases have slowed their growth 'cause US testing is once again a mess. Even California doesn't have much evidence of a peak and reasonable evidence exponential continues. So maybe Italy, Spain, South Korea, China and Washington state are not experiencing exponential. And that's not comforting.
And you're wrong about the article - it definitely says the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong 'cause they did.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...