Enter Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Reich and his colleagues have developed a method to compare and ultimately to merge the diverse models of the disease's progression into one "ensemble" projection. The resulting forecast is sobering: By June 6, the cumulative death toll in the U.S. will reach 110,000.
Reich's approach builds on work he's done over the past four years for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pulling together the many forecasts that U.S. experts create annually to predict how that year's seasonal influenza will play out.
Reich's team has set up a similar system to compare coronavirus models. It's a sort of portal through which the scientists behind each COVID-19 model can communicate key details about their methodology and results, so that, as Reich explains, "all of these forecasts can be represented in a single standardized way. And this makes it really easy to make apples-to-apples comparisons between these models." End quote
The 50 different states have handled protection for nursing home residents widely different. By far this has been the biggest unknown for total state deaths, particularly in NY and MI.
