Four months later, the US is seeing a steady 7-day average of 50k to 60k new cases per day. This is a factor of 4 or 5 less than the number of daily new cases that were observed over the December-January third wave period. It seems therefore that one (the?) core prediction of this post, namely, that we’d see a fourth wave sometime between March and May that would be as bad or worse than the third wave, turned out to be badly wrong.
Zvi’s post is long, so let me quote the sections where he makes this prediction:
Instead of that being the final peak and things only improving after that, we now face a potential fourth wave, likely cresting between March and May, that could be sufficiently powerful to substantially overshoot herd immunity.
and,
If the 65% number is accurate, however, we are talking about the strain doubling each week. A dramatic fourth wave is on its way. Right now it is the final week of December. We have to assume the strain is already here. Each infection now is about a million by mid-May, six million by end of May, full herd immunity overshoot and game over by mid-July, minus whatever progress we make in reducing spread between now and then, including through acquired immunity.
It seems troubling that one of the most upvoted COVID-19 post on LessWrong is one that argued for a prediction that I think we should score really poorly. This might be an important counterpoint to the narrative that rationalists “basically got everything about COVID-19 right”*.
It seems troubling that one of the most upvoted COVID-19 post on LessWrong is one that argued for a prediction that I think we should score really poorly.
I agree. FWIW, I strong-downvoted this post in December. I think this is the first LW post that I have strong-downvoted before.
Additionally, I commented on it (and on threads where this post was shared elsewhere, e.g. on Facebook) to explain my disagreement with it, and recorded ~the lowest forecast of anyone who submitted their forecast here that there’d be a 4th wave in the US in 2021.
What I failed to do was offer to bet here on the 4th wave question. I think the only time that I tried to make a bet on this topic was in a discussion on Facebook (set to friends-only) that began with “Well, it’s time to pull the fire alarm on the UK mutation.” I commented on the post on 12/26/20 with the following:
Would you be interested in operationalizing a bet on this? (If you don’t think its good practice to bet money on COVID infections/cases/deaths or otherwise aren’t interested in betting money, we can just make it a reputational bet.)
I get the sense that like Zvi you are being too pessimistic about how bad the new strain will be for the US relative to how bad thing would have been even without the new strain.
Four months later, the US is seeing a steady 7-day average of 50k to 60k new cases per day. This is a factor of 4 or 5 less than the number of daily new cases that were observed over the December-January third wave period. It seems therefore that one (the?) core prediction of this post, namely, that we’d see a fourth wave sometime between March and May that would be as bad or worse than the third wave, turned out to be badly wrong.
Zvi’s post is long, so let me quote the sections where he makes this prediction:
and,
It seems troubling that one of the most upvoted COVID-19 post on LessWrong is one that argued for a prediction that I think we should score really poorly. This might be an important counterpoint to the narrative that rationalists “basically got everything about COVID-19 right”*.
*from: https://putanumonit.com/2020/10/08/path-to-reason/
I agree. FWIW, I strong-downvoted this post in December. I think this is the first LW post that I have strong-downvoted before.
Additionally, I commented on it (and on threads where this post was shared elsewhere, e.g. on Facebook) to explain my disagreement with it, and recorded ~the lowest forecast of anyone who submitted their forecast here that there’d be a 4th wave in the US in 2021.
What I failed to do was offer to bet here on the 4th wave question. I think the only time that I tried to make a bet on this topic was in a discussion on Facebook (set to friends-only) that began with “Well, it’s time to pull the fire alarm on the UK mutation.” I commented on the post on 12/26/20 with the following:
However, the bet never came to fruition.