Why I take “the end of the pandemic is near” LANCET article with a huge grain of salt

 Today is Jan. 26, 2022, and I discovered a highly cited article predicting the end of the current COVID-19 pandemic is near, in the renowned medical journal The LANCET. 

The article, Murray, Christopher JL. "COVID-19 will continue but the end of the pandemic is near." The Lancet (2022) concluded that “the era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over. After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.” In addition, the article shared its codes on Github, which has earned 6 stars and 1 fork as of now.

This optimistic predictions came from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Seattle, WA 98105, USA (IHME), which is well-publicized since the very beginning of the pandemic. Just a little bit of retrospective effort leads to the same optimistic predictions from IHME back in Mar. 2020.

Links to the original tweet, https://twitter.com/IHME_UW/status/1243167622209736705?s=20

Links to the original press release on Mar. 26, 2020.

The sad truth is, these predictions never materialized. The Covid-19 pandemic didn't end anywhere near June 2020. For your conveniences, here is a snapshot from the US CDC case tracker.

I understand that probably nobody has a working crystal ball, but the track record of IHME prediction is not exactly confidence-infusing. So I will probably take their new predictions in the Lancet similarly with a huge grain of salt.

What do you think about their predictions? Have you found any flaws in their assumptions or models? Feel free to share in the comment section.

Or if you are commenting a few months or even years after today (Jan. 26, 2022), it should be very interesting to witness the success/failure of this IHME prediction.

A Farewell email from a departing employee at a Tech Giant Company

Recently, there is an interesting Reddit post containing the farewell email of a departing employee [1,2], which may have thrown some light on the experience of a “pipped” software programming employee’s life at this specific Tech Giant Company. 

As stated in the email, the on-call ticket queue is extraordinarily “challenging”, very high employee churn rate, readily available Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) treatment, and etc. 

What do you think about the culture at this specific company? Is the culture “toxic” as someone claimed online or is it just “normal”?

Reference: 

1. Reddit Posts
2. Internet Archive WayBack Machine (in case original Reddit post got deleted)

Disclaimer: As always, the authenticity of the reddit post (and of course, almost anything online as you can see) cannot be guaranteed.