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Survey of infectious disease experts

Brian Leiter

Here; an excerpt (but see the charts in the article for much more detail, including degrees of confidence):

The most recent survey, taken on March 16 and 17, found that, as a group, the experts think that as of March 15, only 12 percent of infections in the U.S. had been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They think there’s a 73 percent chance of a second wave of hospitalizations this fall. And they expect approximately 200,000 deaths in the U.S. by the end of the year….

The expert consensus is to expect about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 this year, but the uncertainty around that number is also huge: There’s an 80 percent chance the final number will be between 19,000 and 1.2 million, according to these estimates.

According to the CDC, there were a bit more than 2,800,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2017.  So coronavirus, on the average estimate, would increase deaths in the United States by about 7%, but might increase it by as much as 40%!

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2 responses to “Survey of infectious disease experts”

  1. M

    So coronavirus, on the average estimate, would increase deaths in the United States by about 7%

    Of course some people who die of COVID-19 would have died in some other way. And some of the measures that are being taken to combat COVID-19, particularly social distancing and increased emphasis on hygiene, will presumably lower the number of deaths that would have occurred, e.g. due to flu. On the other hand, due to the overwhelming of medical facilities, some people who would not have died in other ways will die due to that overwhelming. How this is going to interact is one more deep uncertainty.

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  2. Philippe Lemoine

    I just published a very detailed blog post (https://necpluribusimpar.net/are-we-headed-toward-an-unprecedented-public-health-disaster/) on the situation and the results of this survey don't surprise me.

    Here is the last paragraph of the post, where I lay out this conclusion:

    "In short, what I would like people to understand is that the situation is really very weird, that the data we have are difficult to interpret, generally of poor quality and often difficult to reconcile with each other. People who are convinced that the epidemic is going to kill millions of people make a whole bunch of assumptions about why there are all these inconsistencies, which are often quite plausible, but we have to recognize that in the vast majority of cases they are mostly speculative at the moment and not supported by a lot of evidence. After this week’s figures, I now have little doubt that, even in the most optimistic scenario that seems plausible to me, many people are going to die in Italy, France and Spain, as well no doubt as in many other countries where it’s still too early to know whether the situation will follow a similar trajectory to that in Italy. But “a lot of people”, given the uncertainty which I think characterizes the situation, could be a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands as it could be several hundred thousand or even more than a million in France alone. At the moment, I have absolutely no idea. I know there are a lot of people who think they do, but at the risk of making a lot of them angry, I don’t think they know any more than I do. Again, I think the risk of a worst case scenario is enough to suggest the pretty radical strategy I briefly described above, but I also think it would be a mistake to delude ourselves about the very significant state of uncertainty we are in."

    I think this is why the experts in the survey you shared were all over the place in terms of what they predict will happen.

    Most of the post is devoted to a discussion fo the model used to do the simulations everybody was talking about this week. I argue that, given how many degrees of freedom there are in the specification and parametrization of the model, as well as the uncertainty about the value of the parameters, we can't really trust the results of the simulations. I think this part of the post will be of particular interest to philosophers of science who are curious to know more about this kind of models.

    As for what should be done, I agree that the economic consequences of a shutdown can't be ignored, and that we can't stay confined forever (it has been 5 days here in France), but I still think that, at this point, there are enough reasons to prepare for the worst, even though it may not happen. As I argue in my post, we'll know more in 2/3 weeks. My view is basically that shutting everything down during that period just in case won't make a huge difference if the worst case scenario doesn't happen, but that not doing it will if it does.

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