The 27-Year-Old Who Became a Covid-19 Data Superstar

Love the shade throw by the professional forecaster at the amateur who upstaged them and the class shown by the amateur at said shade.

"The IHME’s Murray has his own take on Gu’s exit. He says Gu’s model would not have picked up on the seasonal nature of the coronavirus and would have missed the winter surge in cases and deaths. “He had the epidemic going away in the winter, and we had picked up that there was seasonality as early as May,” Murray says."

The machine learning methods used by Gu work well at short-range predictions, Murray says, but “are not very good at understanding what is going on” in the bigger picture. The algorithms, based on the past, can’t account for virus variants and how well vaccines may or may not work against them, according to Murray. For its part, IHME called the early peak of the virus correctly, then erred when it came to predicting a steep decline in deaths until it adjusted its model to better reflect reality. “We got it wrong the first of April,” Murray says. “Since then we are the only group that has gotten it right consistently.”

What a di$k with a small ego and a terrible model. Forecasting is a hard business especially something as hard as a pandemic. Why not accept your faults with grace and learn from others?