Will the coronavirus kill 53 million people? The problem of predictions and power of providence

Will the Wuhan coronavirus kill fifty-three million people?

According to an AI-powered simulation, it could infect as
many as 2.5 billion people within forty-five days and kill as many as 52.9
million of them.

That’s the horrible news.

Here’s the better news: the computer doesn’t know all that
we know.

The technologist who built the predictive model used
mortality rate statistics as they have been reported. But medical professionals
say the actual mortality rate from the Wuhan virus is much lower than first reports
would indicate.

A professor explains: “If a high proportion of infected
persons are asymptomatic, or develop only mild symptoms, these patients may not
be reported and the actual number of persons infected in China may be much
higher than reported. This may mean that the mortality rate (currently
estimated at 2% of infected persons) may be much lower.”

In addition, containment of the outbreak in China and
prevention of its spread to other countries is expected to result in a much
lower number of infections and deaths than initial reports would suggest. The
model’s predictions also seem much too high given other medical experience. For
example, the flu infected about 8 percent of the population over seven to eight
months last year; the AI model making news has one-third of the world’s
population being infected in six weeks.

Experts now believe that the coronavirus is likely to spread
around the world but it is unlikely to be as deadly as predicted. We should
also note that the common flu, blamed for killing fifty million people after
World War I, is still around. So far this season, it has infected nineteen
million people, causing 180,000 hospitalizations and killing 10,000 people.

And yet we are not nearly as alarmed about it as we are about the Wuhan virus.

The problem of predictions and power of providence

Two facts follow.

One: Our predictions about the future are based on our…