Actuarial and Statistical Problems Around the Covid Phenomenon

Most of us are old enough to remember how bad models were so implicated in the 2008 financial crisis. The dawn of the Covid phenomenon was greeted by a plethora of models predicting doom of strikingly similar scale and, without exception, utterly failing to describe reality even vaguely. Those models generally assumed that there was a deadly virus and that lockdowns would “slow the spread” of it, resulting in less dying. One would call the results comical if their impact on society hadn’t been so tragic.