Coronavirus modeling has become the latest partisan flash point.
A new fault line is emerging in the nation’s polarized response to the coronavirus pandemic: The modeling used to predict its death count and spread.
Early on, bleak forecasts spurred support for extreme social-distancing measures, shutting down whole swaths of the American economy.
But in recent days, as scientists lowered projections for deaths from Covid-19 — in large part, scientists said, because social distancing is working — influential conservatives began casting the data as evidence the virus was never really that bad.
At this point, we should not be surprised that the model got it wrong,” Tucker Carlson said on Fox News, calling one model used by the White House “completely disconnected from reality.”
Brit Hume reminded his viewers that the models were responsible for a “total lockdown” of much of the economy that threw “millions of workers out into the streets.”
“COVID-19 Projection Models Are Proving to Be Unreliable,” read a headline Thursday in the National Review.
The advancing narrative is more than an academic lament, carrying significant implications not only for the debate over the reopening of the economy, but for the reelection of President Donald Trump. Democrats have pummeled Trump for his initial response to the pandemic and expect a cratering economy to work against him in November. In shifting blame to the models, conservatives are suggesting an alternative place to put fault.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/10/trump-coronavirus-data-modeling-179226