Silver came on the scene as a “data journalist,” promising to deliver a fact-based view of politics based on statistical analysis. But it turns out that there just isn’t a lot of clean data that can be used for data-driven political journalism, so he generally reverts to punditry of the worst sort.
Silver is out of his depth and way beyond his area of competence. There is fundamentally no reason to pay any attention to him when he tries to write about the pandemic. He ain’t much of a pundit, and clearly is no journalist.
Nicole Westman knows her stuff and knows what she is doing.