“The latest estimates from the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Medicine show that the daily number of infections and hospitalisations will peak at around 182,923 and 2,893, respectively. The cumulative number of deaths by mid-May is likely to be around 3,206.”
When I read that I thought “what nonsense”. The numbers didn’t pass the common sense test. The sniff test. Note also the very specific numbers. This is called “spurious accuracy” and tells you the modellers don’t know the limits of the model. Turns out I was right.
I made a “hard prediction “ at the time that we’d see the peak in a couple of weeks, ie around now, and at around 50,000 cases per day. I did that with my prediction machine: Our World in Data and an iPad.
On 3 March, I said:
… we are just days away from the peak in Hong Kong and the end of the wave will be around Mid April. There you have a Hard Prediction.
Which is pretty much spot on. At least as far as the peak is concerned. There is no other country where the peak of Omicron has been subsequently topped by a later peak. In some cases they bounce around a bit, as we seem to be doing here, then resume steep downward trends. Yet the government and its expert advisers keep saying we “won’t know” until later in March or April when the wave will end.
So my next “hard prediction” is that the isolation facilities currently being built, like at the old Kai Tak airport site, won’t be needed by the time of Mass Testing (also unneeded, imho).
Note the high numbers above for New Zealand, another Zero Covid stalwart, second highest in the world after HK. Of course one could argue that holding the virus at bay helped them get their vax rate high, and that’s true. Here in Hong Kong, however, we failed to use the time to vax the most vulnerable and vax rates for the over 80s is a miserable 28%. The average and median age of death here is 85.
