On March 4, I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at UW – Superior on my research on cascading expert failure (ungated version here). You can find a video of the talk on my YouTube channel . Thanks to Dr Joshua K. Bedi for hosting and for the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue for sponsoring the event.
In the talk, I discuss how the decision early in the pandemic to reserve COVID-19 tests to just hospital cases led to cascading expert failure. I failed, however, to bring that story to its conclusion, so I rectify that here.
By restricting tests to hospitals, there was an upward bias in the results making COVID-19 appear far more deadly than it actually was. Those results were fed into models like the now-infamous Imperial College London model, leading to forecasts in the millions over a period of months. This, in turn, fed into the narrative of lockdowns. Even as more and more evidence emerged that the virus was not as deadly as once thought and that the lockdowns actually contributed to the spread, those bad policies persisted.
