Hasn't been difficult to predict? You might want to let SAGE know. We have had ~18 months of data to work with and on the 8th Sept SAGE laid out the likely epidemic trajectory for the next two months. With much of the adult population vaccinated and ONS estimates of ~90% of people having antibodies they laid out likely scenarios in which hospitalisations would exceed those in January when we were early in the vaccine roll out and had less immunity from infections.
As for maths professors there is one from my old institution tweeting graphs about exponential growth and doubling times of hospitalisations....... They have been level for two months.
The pandemic has been a real eye opener in which I have seen certain academics who I would normally think of as intelligent say and tweet some truly remarkably stupid things. I was flicking through the tweets of very recent science Nobel laureate and found they had re-tweeted Tomas Peuyo's 'hammer and the dance' nonsense early in the pandemic ....... oh well.
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The modelling has, in my view, been a disaster. Worse than that it has used to implement some truly bizarre restrictions on peoples lives. I like the following simple observation by Euzebiusz Jamrozik:
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