Later today, the province is releasing its look into the future on how COVID-19 could possibly impact the province.
Health Minister John Haggie calls it their “crystal ball exercise,” stating the province is on the edge of a surge. Government’s predictive analytics group will discuss what the future may hold at 6:00 p.m.
A number of provinces, including Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Quebec have already released modeling to determine how the virus will affect the population.
He says they are possibilities and probabilities looking at the future through a “fuzzy crystal ball” to be able to plan for the worst-case scenario while hoping for the best.
From the point of view of projections, Haggie says some statisticians are concerned about modeling.
He says the key was having sufficient patient data points to be able to use them to try and model or predict the future.
(Illustration of ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses—such as the coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19. Image courtesy CDC.)
Haggie says the way the province’s data and disease pattern unfolded it was too difficult to predict.
Until very recently, Haggie claims epidemiologists were very unhappy about the confidence they would have in the answers they received.
