Model looks forward

The latest version of a coronavirus model, released Sunday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, projects nearly 5,400 deaths in Florida, with a range between 3,027 and 11,592.

A week ago, the estimate was 3,971. When the state and the nation were mostly shut down, the model projected 1,900 for the state.

Gov. Ron DeSantis downplayed the University of Washington model — and others — on Monday.

“Has that been accurate so far? Have any of the models been accurate so far?” he said at a news conference in Fort Myers. “Let’s just be honest. The models have not been accurate.”

Early in the pandemic, he said widely reported models warned that hundreds of thousands of Floridians would be hospitalized by the end of April. As local governments, and ultimately the state, instituted increasingly stringent closures of businesses and told people to stay home, the numbers never hit the mid six figures. Hospitalizations reported by the state Department of Health never got higher than 6,000 in April.

DeSantis said the models make unreasonable assumptions. And they don’t have a good way to measure significant differences among state policies, he said.

For example, he cited

Florida’s decision to begin Phase 1 reopening on May 4 in the 64 counties outside South Florida, where coronavirus is so prevalent, or Florida’s ban on admitting people with Covid-19 to nursing homes while other states ordered nursing homes to accept infected people.