Talking Politics

David and Helen talk to 538's Nate Silver about how to read the pandemic data and what they mean for politics. What do we know now that we didn't know six weeks ago? How should we model the future trajectory of the disease? Where does it leave the election in November? A conversation about everything from death rates to spring breaks, and from Belgium to Biden.Talking Points: Are the COVID models we are using now better than they were before?People don’t always understand the conditional predictions behind different models.There is still a lot of uncertainty: almost every parameter of this disease remains unknown.It looks like the downward tail of this disease might be less steep than the upward tail.What is the true fatality rate? We are still behind on testing—we don’t know how many cases are undiagnosed.This number is important for making decisions about opening things up again.The number of deaths as a share of the population probably tells you more than deaths as a share of