As health officials try to get the federal government the best idea of how much the coronavirus pandemic will spread and how long it will last, the prediction models are being hampered by President Donald Trump, forcing them to take his misinformation and lies into account.
Predictive models are important in the preparation for and the fight against any pandemic. Trump ignored earlier models when he had a chance to get ahead of the virus, choosing instead to call it a “hoax” that no one had to worry about.
Models are particularly important now because the United States has the most confirmed cases of coronavirus in the world and the pandemic is poised to spread further and kill more people. And the situation is only getting worse because Trump is not only spreading misinformation but health officials also now have to incorporate the misinformation into their predictive models.
According to the Washington Post:
Its practitioners use math and scientific principles to understand disease, project its consequences, and figure out ways to survive and overcome it. Their models are not meant to be crystal balls predicting exact numbers or dates. They forecast how diseases will spread under different conditions. And their models allow policymakers to foresee challenges, understand trend lines and make the best decisions for the public good. But one factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that, in turn, could affect their models.”
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The models must take the misinformation into account because the models have to consider that people will not take the crisis seriously because of Trump’s lies.
The notion is deeply troubling, say leading health experts, because what the country does next and how many people die depend largely on what evidence U.S. leaders and the public use to inform their decisions. Epidemiologists worry their research — intended to avert massive deaths in situations exactly like this pandemic — will be dismissed by federal leaders when it is needed most.”
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic. He has touted dangerous unproven treatments such as chloroquine and disinfectants, accused the media of hysteria, and is even hell-bent on reopening the country too early, a move that is ill-advised based on the latest predictive model.
A new model released Thursday by the University of Washington’s School of Medicine is one of the first to forecast a national peak. It projects that the peak in daily U.S. deaths will arrive in mid-April, and the tail end of that curve, subsiding below 10 daily deaths, will arrive by the first week of June. But that projection comes with huge caveats because of estimations and assumptions that have to be built into the calculation, given how much is still unknown about the disease COVID-19. The Washington model assumes the entire country will maintain these strict restrictions until summer. But Trump has increasingly made clear he wants to reopen parts of the country by Easter on April 12. And on Thursday, Trump unveiled a plan to identify specific counties that he thinks should reopen soon.”
The model also predicts that by the end of the summer the death toll in the United States could stand at nearly 162,000, especially if Trump ignores health officials and coaxes Americans to go back to business as usual and “pack the churches” along with continuing to refuse to help states that ask for it.
This is why Trump’s press conferences are dangerous. Rather than let the task force and the health professionals handle the pandemic and the response, Trump has hijacked every single one of them to spew misinformation that will enable the further spread of the virus and cause more deaths. He makes our country less safe and more prone to disasters. As this latest disaster continues to unfold, Trump will insist that his administration is successfully handling it, but the models and the reality will show the opposite.
Featured image via screen capture
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