In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses. Of the rest they were computed from random things like news reports from Chinese media, friends who happened to work in hospitals, etc.
When more data did become available the models were often never updated. I reviewed the code of several models during the pandemic. Beyond having severe bugs, they also frequently used values from January in December or even well into 2021! As more data came in it became clear that the original assumptions were far too pessimistic, but epidemiology doesn't distinguish clearly between assumptions, simulation results and observational data. So they just kept using the old numbers. It got their results in the news and peer reviewers didn't care.
> All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways.
Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. That doesn't fit with any classical form of germ theory, but the COVID response was based on the assumption of high-school level germ theory being complete, even when collected sample data showed that couldn't be true.
> In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses.
The parameter’s my region’s epidemiologists were using for their models was certainly being updated as new data became available. I even had a conversation with one of them on Reddit about it.
> Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once.
Eh? It is the same natural selection, competitive process at large scale and in the body.
When more data did become available the models were often never updated. I reviewed the code of several models during the pandemic. Beyond having severe bugs, they also frequently used values from January in December or even well into 2021! As more data came in it became clear that the original assumptions were far too pessimistic, but epidemiology doesn't distinguish clearly between assumptions, simulation results and observational data. So they just kept using the old numbers. It got their results in the news and peer reviewers didn't care.
> All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways.
Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. That doesn't fit with any classical form of germ theory, but the COVID response was based on the assumption of high-school level germ theory being complete, even when collected sample data showed that couldn't be true.