Dr. Murray addresses concerns over COVID-19 models being used to guide policy
Concerns overs flawed metrics of coronavirus models; Health Metrics and Evaluation Institute director Dr. Christopher Murray weighs in.
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Dr. Christopher Murray, who helped created the influential coronavirus pandemic model often used by the White House coronavirus task force, acknowledged on Monday that “all models are flawed” and said that “our models have been the only ones that have been closest to being accurate.”
Murray, the director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), made the comments on “America’s Newsroom” responding to criticism of the model.
He specifically responded to an article published in STAT, which referenced the IHME model and, citing critics, said that the “influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies.”
“My responses is the people that are writing that are fans of the other types of models that suggest there is going to be much bigger deaths in the U.S. so those are the people who believe in these mathematical models that suggest numbers closer to a million plus deaths in the United States,” Murray said. “Of course all models are flawed, but we happily compare our predictions over the next week or two weeks to any predictions from alternative models and at least so far our models have been the only ones that have been closest to being accurate.”
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As of Monday morning, the IHME model was projecting that by Aug. 4, COVID-19 deaths could reach 60,308 (estimate range of 34,063 to 140,381) across the U.S. during the epidemic’s first wave. That number was about 8,500 lower than the average U.S. predictions for cumulative COVID-19 deaths published four days before, however, the uncertainty intervals overlap. The week before, the IHME model had projected more than 93,000 Americans would die of the virus over the same period.
Earlier this month President Trump said he believes the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus pandemic will be "substantially less" than the 100,000 once projected, arguing the country was nearing the peak of the outbreak.
Murray said the changes in the model’s projections have to do with the changes in data provided by states.
“If you think about it, we are trying to take in all the data that each state’s reporting about cases, hospitalizations and deaths. There’s all sorts of challenges some of the states are having, even reporting deaths day by day,” Murray said. “We see these big swings in some states where suddenly hundreds of extra deaths show up from a week ago and so we want to make sure that when we make a new set of forecasts that we’ve addressed all these sort of data issues.”
On Monday, host Ed Henry brought up the more than 22 million people who have filed jobless claims over the past month after many businesses were forced to close to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Henry asked, “What would you say to the restaurant worker … they’ve been furloughed maybe for four or five weeks and they say that they lost their job because lawmakers in both parties, the president, the White House, Dr. Fauci and others looked at your models and others that critics say are flawed and shut things down and now they’re out of work?”
“Our role in all this is to try and produce, particularly for hospitals planning for the surge, the best possible forecasts of when hospitals and health care providers might see cases,” Murray said in response. “And if you go back to our very first set of predictions we said the number of deaths in the U.S. were not going to be, at least in this first wave, one, two million deaths, we said 30,000 to 150,000 deaths and so far all of our revisions of those predictions have been well within that range and remained in that range.
“So we’ve gone down from an average estimate of about 80,000 deaths to around about 60,000,” he continued. “We revised down our forecast for some of the southern states because there was more social distancing than we expected.”
He went on to say that “so far our numbers have been pretty close to what's happening.”
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“It could be that the million plus deaths can happen, of course we don't have a crystal ball, but we think that the trajectory we are on suggests that the U.S. is around the peak and we’re declining and we’re not going to see that really large number of deaths,” he said.
As of Monday, more than 761,000 coronavirus cases have been reported in the United States with more than 40,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Fox News’ Victor Garcia contributed to this report.
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