Experts had estimated tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza by now that never happened. Why does no one call them out?

In February, a group of experts from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and  Tropical Medicine analyzed the data from Gaza - mostly based on Hamas sources - and determined what they felt were the likely number of excess deaths in Gaza over the following six months, based on three scenarios: immediate ceasefire, status quo and escalation.

They were nice enough to break up the projections into two three-month chunks - meaning that we can see what their estimates of deaths would be from February 7 to today, May 6, and we can compare it with what the same Gaza authorities claim today.

As of February 7, Hamas claimed 27,708 deaths. Today, they claim 34,622, an increase of 6,914 from then.

Here are the estimates from the experts for the same time period:

If you assume that we have kept the status quo - there has been no ceasefire since February 7, and the IDF continues to attack Hamas - we see that the experts estimated over four times the number of excess deaths than the Ministry of Health has reported (including the ten thousand phantom deaths that the MoH now calls "incomplete data.") 

If you only count their projections from deaths from traumatic injury - meaning, directly from Israeli fire - the numbers are still way, way above what even Hamas claims today for the past three months.

Their estimates of the number of people who would die from epidemics ranged from 0-30,540. The actual number is zero.

Now, when the study was released, it received plenty of attention from mainstream media. Now when we see that the projections are nowhere near the reality by anyone's numbers, no one bothers to correct the reports.

Even though the people behind the report created an entire website for it, they have not updated the website with newere numbers - because that would show that they were wrong. So the website of these supposedly unbiased researchers is frozen in amber, including the raw data they keep on GitHub. 

As we've seen a number of times in this war, the supposed experts are quick to find reasons to believe Hamas numbers and very reluctant to correct their wrong data when the truth is found to not conform with their assumptions of Israeli evil. I have tried to contact a few of them, such as a Columbia professor who wrote in Newsweek with confidence that 30,000 had been killed in Gaza, asking specific questions about apparent problems in their methodology - and not one has bothered answering me. 

This is not how scholars are supposed to work. They are supposed to admit mistakes, or at least defend their methods from any reasonable objection. 

But instead these supposed academics, scholars and experts stubbornly stick to their increasingly untenable analyses, and then hope everyone forgets about it. 

Bias and science do not mix. These supposedly objective data scientists and statisticians, relying on bad data to estimate even worse projections, are not issuing corrections or mea culpas. Which makes them worse than journalists who at least sometimes are forced to make corrections.

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