I can't find anything concrete there, but "already took into account" is a bit weaselly.
There had to be tons of uncertainty in a) how well people comply with the guidelines and b) how effective that compliance is. It certainly doesn't seem crazy to me more data would lead to revised values for those factors.
They could be more effective than originally expected. It could also just narrow the prediction interval--I'd bet that a lot of the "millions dead" stuff is reporting the high end, rather than the most likely outcome.
Yes, it seems it could either be "measures are more effective than thought" or "disease is not as severe as thought", or both.
Fwiw Michael Burry, someone who has earned the right to be listened to in the face of collective thinking, is strongly arguing for the "disease is not as severe as thought".
He makes the point that a) the new model has some optimistic assumptions, like no interstate travel and b) due to the exponential growth, a small uncertainty in R0 leads to wildly variable outcomes.
I guess I am uneasy with the "disease is not as severe" hypothesis because it's essentially unknowable. There's no objective measure of severity: it depends on knowing how to treat/prevent the disease and whether the necessary resources are available to do so.
While it varies with health care rationing, think CFR is still a useful measure of disease severity and allows us to situate COVID vs. the flu. Knowing the real CFR depends right now on how we calculate the denominator. Burry had analysis that 4% of the undiagnosed asymptomatic Danish population had COVID-19 per blood donation data, which suggests the CFR is 80x less severe than official figures in Denmark.
Anecdotally the disease entered countries weeks, arguably months before any cases were officially announced, making it likely that the denominator is an order of magnitude greater than official stats, and thus CFR an order of mag less severe.
There had to be tons of uncertainty in a) how well people comply with the guidelines and b) how effective that compliance is. It certainly doesn't seem crazy to me more data would lead to revised values for those factors.
They could be more effective than originally expected. It could also just narrow the prediction interval--I'd bet that a lot of the "millions dead" stuff is reporting the high end, rather than the most likely outcome.