The Arizona modeling team has been running models to predict hospital demand from both COVID and non-COVID demand drivers. On November 27th, they wrote to the Arizona state government about their most recent model runs. The results are dire:
No matter what actions are taken, Arizona will experience a hospital crisis in the coming weeks. However, if action is not immediately taken, then it risks a catastrophe on the scale of the worst natural disaster the state has ever experienced. It would be akin to facing a major forest fire without evacuation orders….”
This is a dire half paragraph from academics.
And it is based on modeling that has a key assumption that is probably optimistic:
The models that are projecting a baked in crisis and a catastrophic outcome under a no-change scenario are assuming that there is no change in transmission dynamics from the Thanksgiving holiday. That is a shaky assumption. We know that Thanksgiving has lots of people traveling, even if travel was down significantly this year compared to 2019. We know that Thanksgiving tends to have a lot of talking and loud voices in confined, interior spaces. We know that Thanksgiving tends to have a good amount of drinking. I think that making the assumption that Thanksgiving will not change infection trends is a key assumption that requires significant sensitivity analysis.
However, I also think that the modeling exercise with data that probably was fresh on Tuesday or Wednesday of the week for a Friday release is useful. The model is putting out a floor. Thanksgiving could be a nothingburger but business as usual is still a catastrophe by Christmas. Thanksgiving could produce a significant bump in transmission which moves up the no-intervention hospital overload by days or weeks. The model and its results gives a meaningful floor from which action can be taken to divert from the projected outcomes.
But right now, this is what “optimistic” modeling looks like in some states.
This is what optimism sounds like in ArizonaPost + Comments (51)