Actually baseballrecruit I never said it's a conspiracy, I hate those. I said something is amiss and we aren't getting answers yet. That is actually backed up by data and models that can't be disputed anymore.
Somehow you are misconstruing my take as one that doesn't believe this is serious. And that's false. It is serious and many people have died like you said. My point, as well as other people, is that now (emphasis now) that we know more about what is happening it's time to make adjustments. We know that now we have treatments that work. We are learning now that it is not as deadly on a per capita basis as previously believed. It is perfectly acceptable to do both at the same time- put in measures to protect the most vulnerable and also put in measures to allow the public to work and support their families. Hopefully more testing will allow that soon and other measures so that individuals can make their own decisions on what they are comfortable doing.
As someone who deals with modeling a lot, and followed the IHME model itself, I can tell you why they overpredicted things. They based their model on what happened in Europe, which in general, had a worse outbreak than we did in the US. Being an informatics based model (one that uses existing results to make predictions versus ones that try to predict things outright), the more information they have, the better the model becomes. Notice that they have a wide uncertainty in their model, in which our current situation was mostly likely within earlier estimates at the lower end. The problem is when some media/people, often based on preconceived notions on both sides, overstate the predictions. They still have a fairly wide uncertainty in them. I still prefer the IHME model myself as they do an excellent job of displaying their results in a way that is understandable, and they use existing data to make their predictions, which often has the least amount of bias in them. Still, as with weather, they can't predict the future.
Speaking of modeling, the weather forecast was pretty gloom and doom about today, and unfortunately, they were right. My wife almost lost it when we lost power during remote vieweing the Easter Church service, her favorite of the year, after having to hunker down for half an hour before it due to tornado warnings. I am still thankful that we only had to be stuck inside due to the virus, and lost power for a couple of hours due to severe weather, as things could have been much worse.
