Computer Modeling Failed During the Ebola Outbreak

the_newsbeagle writes: Last fall, the trajectory of the Ebola outbreak looked downright terrifying: Computational epidemiologists at Virginia Tech predicted 175,000 cases in Liberia by the end of 2014, while the CDC predicted 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone. They were way off. The actual tally as of January 2015: A total of 20,712 cases in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone combined, and in all three countries, the epidemic was dying down. But the modelers argue that this really wasn't a failure, because their predictions served as worst-case scenarios that mobilized international efforts.

Comments

Re:wrong is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, IF there hadn't been a very robust response, it could easily have been that bad.

Re:wrong is right

[silentcoder]

This is almost a cliche, it's exactly what happened after Y2K. We saw a potential threat, a huge one, and a way to prevent it. We mustered great resources to prevent it - and succeeded. But unlike in the movies those who prevented the threats were not celebrated - immediately afterwards they were accused of having made up the threat to justify the resources.

It's a fundamentally stupid failure of logic, but it happens over and over. If you manage to prevent a threat from realizing, people claim the threat was never real.