Predictions four to eleven times higher than actual COVID-19 hospitalizations

Garbage in, garbage out: The computer models being used by hospitals and government authorities to justify the shutdown of the entire American economy have routinely been way too high, four to eleven times higher than the actual numbers.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which owns HealthData.org and has been cited by the Trump administration, is getting called out for promulgating COVID-19 projections that turn out to be far too high. The institute’s projections are treated as the gold standard by several American hospital systems and state governments, according to its website, which warns that the demand for “ventilators, general hospital beds, and ICU beds” are “expected to exceed capacity.”

Yet it overestimated by four times how many hospitalizations would happen in New York State on one day this week, already accounting for the “lockdown” in the state, according to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson

For example, the Institute predicted that on April 1 New York would have 50,000 hospitalizations. It only has 12,000. Similarly,

The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis noted similar overestimation on a national level, saying the UW model is using New York and New Jersey data – the epicenter of the epidemic – “and applying it to the rest of the U.S.”

This “garbage” model estimated 121,000 hospitalizations Wednesday, about four times higher than the actual number, he said, delving into more wild divergences between projections and results state-by-state. Tennessee and Texas projections were particularly off, at 11 and nine times higher than actually resulted, while Virginia’s was the closest at only two times higher. [emphasis mine]

For any model to be that badly off in only a week indicates it is total garbage, entirely divorced from reality and more a political document expressing the desires of those who wrote it.

But we’re all gonna die! We’ve got to do something! We’ve got to assume bad things so we can justify our actions!

New York: Where politicians consider criminals their base and ordinary citizens their enemy

Like the Democrats running California, the reaction of the Democrats running New York to the Wuhan virus has nicely revealed who they consider their base, and who they consider their enemies:

The first story is one of several from New York. Even as the Democrats in charge have moved to place all citizens under house arrest, they also seem to think releasing criminals from jail (the perfect type of quarantine) is a good idea.

No one should harbor any doubts about where the Democrats loyalties lie. They are not really interested in saving lives. They are interested in stamping a jack boot on the face of every decent person. And they know that if their own efforts to impose martial law fail, they know that releasing a lot of violent criminals surely will help.