Coronavirus: Fear is the reality of modelling scenarios

There’s modelling and there’s reality.

Modelling, according to the followers of Malthus, would have us believe the world would have been inundated by elephants hundreds of years ago, unless various population controls were undertaken.

The reality was that elephants were never going to cover the Earth and blot out humankind despite “doing the maths”. The simple reality is truth gets in the way of hysterics who want to do the Malthusian “maths” and predict simple mathematical calculations on the back of an envelope.

Fatalistic predictions of how many Australians would die were hysterical, stupid and counter-productive. Neither Scott Morrison nor Anthony Albanese have engaged in such stupid talk. Commentators, so-called experts and think tanks have filled the vacuum for the anxious and online panic merchants.

Yes, the Australian people deserve all the information they get — and the Newspoll suggests they are satisfied with the level of information they are receiving — but the release of worst-case-scenario modelling doesn’t help anyone given the real projections of the “flattening” of the curve.