Well, I certainly didn’t plan on writing about this.

I originally sat down to write an update on the forecasting performance of the January 30th prediction for confirmed cases. I was really happy to see how well it was doing and the high accuracy rate. It was doing nicely as a benchmark and the actual number of confirmed had started to run below the forecasted numbers, indicating a potential slowdown in the outbreak.

Then I opened up BNO News to see over 60 thousand cases. What!?

Although I have written a lot on this topic, I still have many thoughts in my head that I haven’t been able to fully put down on paper. One of those thoughts was a list of some things to watch out for with the coronavirus to determine if risk of further outbreak or a pandemic was increasing. These could be things like:

An acceleration in the reported number of cases each day An uptick in cases with no traceable source of infection Accelerating cases in a country outside of China A sudden jump in the number of confirmed cases

Everything had been pointing toward good news for several days until that last one hit. Almost 15 thousand new cases in a day. Wow.

So, now we have to reassess the risk of the situation. Is it really just a recalibration of the reporting methodology? Or something different? A change of this magnitude is a huge hit to the overall credibility of the reporting process.

There have been a lot of models predicting cases in the hundreds of thousands. The data that was coming out did not seem to support that. Now, I’m not so sure. What seemed alarmist a few hours ago no longer seems so impossible.

What I do know is this. The numbers coming out on a daily basis were suspect, specifically because they were so clean. The high accuracy of my forecasting model was not an anomaly. There are a lot of forecasts of varying approaches floating around that were also doing a really good job of predicting the number of new cases. Reality is almost always messier than simple math models. Models are good as benchmarks or as schematics for what might happen. For reality to fit a model so well…that raises suspicion.

But, suspicion doesn’t mean that something fishy is going on. However, with such a large jump, now we are starting to have more questions. Now, we have more uncertainty.

In many situations, we have to rely on information that can never perfectly describe reality or measure it with absolute certainty. That being said, most measurements or approximations of reality are pretty darn close and useful enough that we don’t suddenly become completely unsure of what the heck is going on.

I find this new information incredibly troubling. No matter how you cut it, something wasn’t being reported properly.

It’s always important to be on the lookout for smoke. Something like this? This looks like fire.

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