If McCairn said that the worst-case scenario was that a billion people would die from COVID, it's off by less than two orders of magnitude from the real number of people who have died from COVID so far.
And he didn't even say it was the middle scenario but the worst-case scenario. If he had said that the best-case scenario was that half a million people would die, then the middle point of his two estimates on a log scale would be about 22 million people, which is close to the real number of people who have died so far.
If JC and Housatonic say almost no-one has died from COVID, then their estimate is further off from reality on a log scale than McCairn's worst-case scenario.
