There are hundreds of constants in there. A lot of them appear to be wild-ass guesses. Presumably, all of them affect the output of the model in some way.
When a model has enough parameters for which you can make unsubstantiated guesses, you have a ton of wiggle room to generate whatever particular output you want. I'd like to see policy and public discussion focus more on the key parameters (R-naught, hospitalization rate, fatality rate) and less on overly-sophisticated models.
Here's one params file that specifies some of the inputs to a run of the model:
https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/param_...
Here's another one:
https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/data/admin_...
There are hundreds of constants in there. A lot of them appear to be wild-ass guesses. Presumably, all of them affect the output of the model in some way.
When a model has enough parameters for which you can make unsubstantiated guesses, you have a ton of wiggle room to generate whatever particular output you want. I'd like to see policy and public discussion focus more on the key parameters (R-naught, hospitalization rate, fatality rate) and less on overly-sophisticated models.