You're saying "likely" as a hedge, when in fact you are instead merely expressing an opinion, without any knowledge of the actual numerical likelihood of such an event having happened.
Call my cynical, but time and experience has taught me that people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor.
It’s as if they want to express an opinion without doing the leg work or providing any citations.
Had he invested the time to calculate an estimate of likelihood, I’m willing to bet an estimate or confidence interval would have been parenthetically inserted into his remarks.
That’s what my experience tells me. YMMV
To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?
The vast majority of my conversations and discourse don't require or benefit from giving a range or specific value to such words. Would the preceding sentence be better if I said 90%, 95%, 99.5% instead of 'vast majority'? And to be honest, most people - especially myself - aren't at all accurate with probability estimates, let alone calculations.
I take it you're not a Bayesian. ;)