In a system where forecasters are punished for getting it wrong and rewarded for getting it right, the most accurate people float to the top, and when they work together on a team, they become even more accurate.
The forecasts
Last week we gathered a small group of well-calibrated forecasters with good track records to look at the UK’s pandemic outlook over the next few months. With Britain facing both the worst period of the crisis but also an exit strategy with the vaccine roll-out, “when will this end?” is the most urgent question everyone is asking right now.
We can’t promise clairvoyance, but we made the best use of our team’s skills and produced the following set of estimates on three topics:
- How bad the daily death toll will get
- How many vaccines we’ll have administered at the end of February
- When daily deaths will first fall below 100
Superforecasters cannot predict exactly when the pandemic will be over, but these three questions act as proxies for the questions of how bad it will get, how soon an individual is likely to get a vaccine, and when the pandemic will recede. A double-digit daily death toll does not mean the end of the nightmare, but with large-scale vaccinations taking place it will certainly mean is in sight.
These forecasts are presented as the median estimate of the group; the principle of the “wisdom of crowds”, the idea first suggested by Francis Galton that the median of any large number of guesses will usually be fairly accurate, applies to experienced forecasters as much as anyone.
We also include our “80% confidence” interval as an expression of the uncertainty surrounding our forecast. For example, our central estimate that the death toll will peak at 1,278 with an 80% confidence interval of 892 to 5,750, means we think there’s only a 10% chance it’ll be less than 892 and only a 10% chance it’ll be greater than 5750. (The confidence intervals are represented by the blue rectangles, and the central estimates with the red lines.)
The worst of the pandemic
The median estimate of the group was for the 7-day average of daily deaths to peak at 1,278, but with an 80% confidence interval of 892 — 5,750
Alongside the predictions, we note down anonymous comments from the forecasters in the team to explain their reasoning. Among the notes accompanying this question, perhaps the most optimistic was that there is a “small chance we are at the peak now”.
On the other hand, the worst-case scenario is if the hospital system collapses and we are forced to “en mass palliate anyone over 60/65” and the most pessimistic predicted 5,000 deaths a day. The big factors were new virus strains and “poorly managed vaccination centres causing infections among the most vulnerable and highest priority population”.
However, with 160,000 infections a day currently in the UK and a fatality rate just below 1%, 1,400 deaths a day seems likely.
Another forecaster also predicted that a third wave was “likely” once the current lockdown ended, “with quite possibly the highest caseload yet, but [was] unlikely to have as many fatalities due to prioritised vaccination of elderly and otherwise-vulnerable” individuals.
A lot of this depends on whether the vaccine protects against any new strains, and how quickly those vaccines are rolled out.
The February Vaccine Target
Millions of people are currently waiting for a letter informing them of their vaccination appointment, a jab that will end a year of house arrest and often extreme anxiety. The Prime Minister has promised two million jabs a week, and tens of thousands of lives, and millions of livelihoods, depend on getting the jabs out as soon as possible.
We asked the team to forecast how many vaccine doses will have been administered in the UK by the end of February and the central estimate was 12 million, with an 80% confidence interval of 6 million to 20 million.
Among the big questions are the supply and how much political pressure there will be for the distribution network to move faster. Two more vaccines, by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, are also expected to get approval next month and that will also increase supply.
One forecaster predicted that “Boris’s current target was 13 million for end of February: best guess is they undershoot that slightly and ramp-up only really gets going in March/April…. this has been the consistent pattern of undershooting a bit throughout the pandemic.”
So with a median estimate of 12 million, you can find out when you and your loved ones are likely to receive theirs here.
In which month will deaths fall below 100 a day?
By estimating when deaths fall below 100 a day we can get some idea of when the virus is close to beaten.
Our group estimated April as the most likely month for daily deaths to fall below this level, with an 80% confidence interval of March to August.
Among the key unknowns are new strains, and also whether hospitals get overwhelmed “which results in cascading preventable deaths”. We can estimate when deaths will fall based on first wave patterns, when it took “two and a half months to get from 1k per day to below 100 in the March-July lockdown”, although the vaccination programme might accelerate that. Generally speaking, it takes about three weeks to half the deaths, and so following an expected peak in January, death rates will half four times by late April.
At this point, one forecaster suggests, the government will open up the economy and deaths will continue around 100 a day because this will be regarded as tolerable. Another believes this figure may continue until September, by which time a combination of vaccination and infection will have introduced herd immunity.
The most “optimistic” forecast suggested that we may have got deaths down by March but that might be because “we screw up” and “have killed everyone who could possibly die from it and therefore the virus has nowhere else to go”.
The most pessimistic suggested: “If there is a less successful vaccination programme, multiple policy errors such as keeping schools open once teachers have been vaccinated but not paying attention to cases/repeated attempted opening up, or mutations of the virus, then it might be December before deaths get below this level.”
But another thought that new drugs — the most recent breakthroughs came late last week — will have reduced the fatality rate fairly soon.
January and February 2021 are going to be very traumatic months for tens of thousands of people in the UK. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and if you’re worried about the next few weeks you might want to gain a better estimate of how bad it will get, when your vaccine will come, and most importantly when the nightmare will be over.
And perhaps next time that Britain faces a crisis of this magnitude, we’ll have systems in place that incentivise people to tell the truth, identifying those with strong track records of forecasting, rather than turning to those who tell us what we want to hear.
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