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IHME Projections
The Institute revised its UK COVID-19 model.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations estimate deaths from COVID-19 by country. For the UK, there was major news coverage of our country’s IHME estimates.
This article looks at these IHME projections, and their revisions.
The model and the range
IHME made models to estimate peak demand of healthcare systems. This work focuses on US states. Also, IHME produced estimates for deaths, and for European countries.
The original IHME projection was that the UK would have around 66,000 COVID-19 deaths. One online article in The Guardian had over 18,000 shared links.
How does this fatality model work? Their model fits a curve to the series of reported deaths in each country. This is an empirical model: informed by the shape of COVID-19 deaths in each country.
It is like seeing the initial arc of a thrown ball, then predicting how high and far that ball will travel.
There are extra weights, which seek to model policies like stay-at-home orders. This model does not seek to estimate the spread of COVID-19 within each population.
There is high uncertainty in these estimates. In the original publication, the central prediction for UK deaths by early August was 66,314. The uncertainty interval around that prediction was from about 55,000 to 80,000.
