Republican members on the House Oversight Committee requested a hearing to review coronavirus “modeling platforms” used to predict the impact of the pandemic due to “conflicting data” that has led to “extraordinary burdens” on U.S. citizens.
Rep. Chip Roy and his GOP colleagues authored a letter to the committee’s chairwoman, Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, asking for a formal hearing either in Washington, D.C., or via a virtual platform to review the modeling information that was used to justify the stay-at-home orders across the United States, according to Fox News.
“At the forefront of decisions regarding response efforts lies our ability to understand the breadth and depth of the spread of the illness,” the letter read, adding that there have been “two primary coronavirus modeling platforms — one from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE) at the University of Washington, and one from Imperial College of London.”
“While widely distributed and used by many thought leaders, these models have exhibited conflicting data over time, as well as within comparison of the models themselves,” they added. “These models have also undergone multiple wildly varying revisions, and have not seemed to account for real world behavioral changes, even demonstrating assumptions at odds with visible data in real time.”
The model from the Imperial College London has been heavily scrutinized because of perceived inconsistencies with the number of deaths it predicted. The University of Washington model has also been criticized as “unreliable.”
Those models helped influence decisions behind widespread shutdowns of businesses across the United States and stay-at-home orders.
The economy has taken a significant hit with much of the country shut down, as evidenced by jobless claims jumping by 6.6 million this week and 10% of the labor force being lost over the past three weeks.
Some health officials argue the significant changes to the death toll predictions, many of them highlighted by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, are due to social distancing measures.
“We believe that our healthcare delivery system in the United States is quite extraordinary,” Dr. Deborah Birx said during a White House coronavirus briefing on Wednesday. “I know many of you are watching the Act Now model and the IHME model — and they have consistently decreased the number, the mortality from over almost 90,000 or 86,000, down to 81,000 and now down to 61,000. That is modeled on what America is doing. That’s what’s happening.”
Reps. Paul Gosar, Thomas Massie, Glenn Grothman, Jody Hice, James Comer, and W. Gregory Steube joined Roy in signing the letter.
LETTER: “As Members of the House Oversight Committee, it is our duty to understand how much the congressionally funded departments and agencies scrutinized these [coronavirus] models before using them in response efforts.” https://t.co/ZvVrZhkMaD
— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) April 9, 2020
