Anyone who actually knows this stuff would never say that it’s a matter of “simple math”, that’s absurd. Those people have not been saying that they’re sure about anything at this point, because they’re not.
There’s nothing to prove you wrong yet either, of course, but let’s see how your prediction does over the next few months: between 14,400 and 80,000 deaths in Ireland.
The simple math comment was about estimating IFR, given the sampling in the Netherlands, not about the whole domain.
Maybe you are saying the implied model is too crude. Perhaps, but there's a value in it's simplicity - folks can get a convincing estimate of the rough scale of the IFR, that this disease is serious, not the flu etc.
> let’s see how your prediction does over the next few months: between 14,400 and 80,000 deaths in Ireland.
That prediction, was based on the measures in place over a month ago (very few, which was the point).
We're since in lockdown almost 3 weeks.
However, I think it remains a reasonable prediction for an unmitigated epidemic.
To go back to the simple math: If you believe that 3% of a random sample of the Netherlands have had covid, and that the Netherlands has had 3k deaths, then if 100% were infected they might have 100k deaths (without modeling clustering, and healthcare saturation effects). Their population is 3x Ireland's.
>There’s nothing to prove you wrong yet either, of course,
If the serological sampling had shown instead that their 3k deaths had come from 30% of their population being infected, that would have proved the prediction wrong.
There's loads of subtlety which could improve that estimate (people take time to die, clusters, etc) but there is an increasing body of evidence that the early IFR estimates were not wrong by an order of magnitude.
You really think that if your numbers don't pan out, it will be because Ireland somehow suppressed this thing (put that "genie" back in the bottle as it were), and not simply because its IFR is (or became) lower than you assumed it would be?
It's just splendid how a lot of people will criticize an estimate of deaths assuming no mitigating measures, and then say "see? no problem!" when the outcome is much better after stopping most economic activity for a month.
When you look at countries where front was, it looks different. It is quite cherry picking to pick the best off countties. One of then had no war on its soil (and earned finacially overall).
There’s nothing to prove you wrong yet either, of course, but let’s see how your prediction does over the next few months: between 14,400 and 80,000 deaths in Ireland.