Numbers, math, facts, etc.

The Bottom Line:

Our government and political leadership have been making extraordinary decisions to close down major sectors of the economy, promulgating stay-at-home orders, moving education online, and spending trillions of dollars.

And they have done so with inadequate information. Decision makers don't know how many people are infected or were infected. They don't know how many people are already immune or the percentage of infected that are asymptomatic. They are using untested models that have not been shown to be reliable. This is not science-based decision making, no matter how often this term has been used, and responsibility for this sorry state of affairs is found on both the Federal and state levels.

The meteorological community has a long and successful track record in an analogous enterprise, showing the importance of massive data collection to describe the environment you wish to predict, the value of sophisticated and well-tested models to make the prediction, and the necessity to maintain a dedicated governmental group that is responsible for state-of-science prediction.

Perhaps this approach should be considered by the infectious disease community. and the experience of the numerical weather prediction community might be useful.