May 11, 2020 - 14:14 AMT
Singapore scientists cancel Covid-19 prognosis for Armenia

Scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design have announced that their prediction that the coronavirus outbreak in Armenia will end in August is no longer valid.

The researchers have removed all the graphs and charts for various countries from their website and offered to see forecasts by other centers.

“Covid-19 predictions are fundamentally important for rationalizing planning and mentality, but also challenging due to the innate uncertainty of the complex, dynamic and global pandemic as a typical wicked problem,” researchers said.

“Traditional prediction or forecasting efforts, which aim to make an accurate prediction now to come true in the future, might be misleading in this context of extreme uncertainty. Here, to deal with uncertainty, we had experimented predictive monitoring of the epidemic life cycle curves together with accumulating actual data, to capture changes in the continually-made predictions, which would be traditionally viewed as bad or proof of failure of a prediction model, and make sense such changes as meaningful signals of uncertainty and changes in the real-world scenarios. In turn, such signals from the predicted theoretical future may inform, initiate, and guide actions now to influence the real future. Motivation, theory, method, cases, and caution are in this paper.”

There are now more than 4.1 million cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide, including over 1.4 million recoveries so far, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking figures from the World Health Organization and additional sources.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, more than 282,000 people have died globally from Covid-19 complications.