Any decent statistical model like this should include a confidence interval , if biological is so difficult then the CI would have reflected that . This just seems poor science to me
The 200k/127k people are harping about IS THE CONFIDENCE INTERVAL (well, the upper half of it, hence "up to").
That's half of my point--you'd expect the confidence interval to narrow with more data, regardless of what's going on. On top of that, you've got model error and non-stationarity (e.g., better care is discovered, driving the mortality rate down), which can't be reflected in the confidence interval.
