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Infectious Disease Modelling: What's The Track Record?
Powerline ^
| 04/05/2020
| John Hinderaker
Posted on 04/05/2020 8:13:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Infectious Disease Modeling: What’s the Track Record?
The London Times has a fascinating story on the tiny, incestuous world of infectious disease modelers. It begins with the two modeling outfits in Great Britain: Oxford University and Imperial College, London. We have all learned about Imperial as the source of the two wildly conflicting estimates that the British government has relied on. Now an Oxford professor is questioning Imperial’s model:
The first public signs of academic tensions over Imperials domination of the debate came when Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, published a paper suggesting that some of Imperials key assumptions could be wrong.
It turns out there is some history here. Oxford had the dominant modeling group until Sir Roy Anderson left Oxford for Imperial twenty years ago. He left Oxford because he opposed a colleague’s promotion to a permanent professorship on the ground (apparently false) that she was only being considered because she slept with a member of the panel. That colleague was…Sunetra Gupta. As noted, the disease modeling world is small.
The Times quotes Gupta:
I decided to publish and speak out because the response to this pandemic is having a huge effect on the lives of vulnerable people with a profound cost and it seems irresponsible that we should proceed without considering alternative models. Imperial has a long history of involvement with government and its epidemiological models can have huge importance and translational impact but its tricky to use them to forecast whats going to happen. We need to also consider alternatives.
That is consistent with our repeated call for transparency in epidemiological models, so that we can understand what assumptions are driving the extraordinary actions being taken by many governments. But the Times goes on to ask an important question that I have not previously seen raised: do disease modelers have a track record that deserves to inspire the remarkable confidence that is being reposed in them?
Woolhouse was also working with Anderson when mad cow disease spread from cattle into humans in the 1980s and 1990s and the government asked Oxford to help calculate the scale of the infection. This led to the cull of 4.4 million cattle, which suppressed the disease.
By the time foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) struck in 2001, however, Andersons clash with Gupta had seen him move to Imperial. … Oxford was in effect sidelined and it was from Imperial that Ferguson and Anderson dominated the government response to foot and mouth.
That response, involving the slaughter of more than 11 million sheep and cattle at a cost of more than £8bn was based entirely on modelling and remains hugely controversial with many believing the modellers got it wrong. They were modelling a fast-moving epidemic with little accurate data. A subsequent government inquiry was damning of the general approach and its conclusions may be relevant to the current crisis. It said: The FMD epidemic in UK in 2001 was the first situation in which models were developed in the heat of an epidemic and used to guide control policy . . . analyses of the field data, suggest that the culling policy may not have been necessary to control the epidemic, as was suggested by the models produced within the first month of the epidemic. If so it must be concluded that the models supporting this decision were inherently invalid.
The Imperial modellers next big public challenge came eight years later when swine flu swept the world fortunately killing few Britons because older people tended to be immune and younger ones were strong enough to fight it off. Britain was, however, left with 34 million doses of unused and expensive vaccines. Again there was an inquiry which concluded that ministers had once again treated modellers as astrologers, asking them to provide detailed forecasts when they had too little data.
Modelling did not provide early answers, it concluded. The major difficulty with producing accurate models was the lack of a relatively accurate idea of the total number of cases . . . This is not to reject the use of models, but to understand their limitations: modellers are not court astrologers.
All of that sounds familiar. I conclude with the famous words of Richard Feynman, one of the 20th centuries most eminent scientists: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
TOPICS: Health/Medicine; History; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: infectiousdisease; modelling; pandemic; trackrecord
To: SeekAndFind
This one is looking like the Peak Oil model.
2
posted on
04/05/2020 8:29:35 PM PDT
by
bray
(Pray for President Trump)
To: SeekAndFind
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain." Nobel Prize physicist Richard P. Feynman ,
3
posted on
04/05/2020 8:42:28 PM PDT
by
NoLibZone
(1 Party wants to limit immigration to allow for adequate medical resources to handle Pandemics.)
To: SeekAndFind
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Why do. people make such stupid comments?
4
posted on
04/05/2020 8:42:32 PM PDT
by
TexasGator
(Z1z)
To: SeekAndFind
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Why do. people make such stupid comments?
5
posted on
04/05/2020 8:42:34 PM PDT
by
TexasGator
(Z1z)
To: TexasGator
You think Feynman was stupid?
6
posted on
04/05/2020 9:07:40 PM PDT
by
ifinnegan
(Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
To: SeekAndFind
All models that dictate public policy need to be open source. period.
7
posted on
04/05/2020 9:12:24 PM PDT
by
kvanbrunt2
(spooks won on day 76)
To: SeekAndFind
Whenever you see a situation with complicated prediction models, you also have lots of room for bias to masquerade as reason.
Adams, Scott. Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (p. 65).
8
posted on
04/05/2020 9:21:09 PM PDT
by
tbw2
To: bray
I do like the new title: pandemic astrologers.
To: FirstFlaBn
Just like climate astrologers.
10
posted on
04/05/2020 9:28:13 PM PDT
by
rfp1234
(Democratus Partitus Delendus Est)
To: SeekAndFind
This illustrates the inherent problem with making your best guess... It’s a guess. For every ‘guess’ that ends up correctly predicting a correct outcome, there are a thousand other guesses that ended up predicting an incorrect outcome.
And this is reason why ‘global warming / climate change’ will be dismissed as nonsense by intelligent politicians in the future. Unlike the sheeple politicians who currently subscribe to global warming predictions, politicians in the future will be able to point to this virus, it’s predictions and it’s outcomes to illustrate that scientific guessing is not worthy of taxation measures today to prevent unreliable scientific predictions of our future.
11
posted on
04/05/2020 9:43:47 PM PDT
by
jerod
(Nazi's were essentially Socialist in Hugo Boss uniforms... Get over it!)
To: SeekAndFind
well the yearly flu models suck horribly at predicting what strains will be coming.
12
posted on
04/05/2020 10:07:42 PM PDT
by
Secret Agent Man
(Gone Galt; Not Averse to Going Bronson.)
To: SeekAndFind
The modelers so hoodwinked the General public on global arming they decided they could get more grant dollars from the public till from some other catastrophe and voila! Coronavirus!
13
posted on
04/05/2020 11:40:07 PM PDT
by
immadashell
(Save Innocent Lives - ban gun free zones)
To: TexasGator
IMHO, it’s actually a brilliant statement.
Consider climate “science”. We’re supposed to believe that it matters whether there’s a consensus amongst climate “experts”. Anyone, who expresses doubt is labelled a denier. However, actual science demands that we doubt the experts — i.e. assume they’re ignorant.
In other words, questioning the China Virus models is what scientists do — and the opposite of that the MSM is doing.
To: ifinnegan
“.....You think Feynman was stupid?.....”
No, but I do know he was crazy. As someone who read his books and studied from his textbooks, I can saw with certainty he was not stupid, but he was very crazy.
The Stories about him at the test detonation of the first atomic bomb provide a key insight into how crazy he really was. They were certain a chain reaction would occur, but did not know how or if it would end. Some at the desert site had to physically restrain him.
To: SeekAndFind
16
posted on
04/06/2020 2:32:56 AM PDT
by
GOP Poet
To: tbw2
My early college experience as a research assistant gave me a very cynical view of professors and their models and theories.
17
posted on
04/06/2020 2:54:41 AM PDT
by
SauronOfMordor
(A Leftist can't enjoy life unless they are controlling, hurting, or destroying others)
To: SeekAndFind
Modelers, you've come a long way baby
18
posted on
04/06/2020 3:54:36 AM PDT
by
USS Alaska
(NUKE THE MOOSELIMB, TERRORISTS, NOW!)
To: SeekAndFind
Just a guess but I’d bet it’s just as inaccurate as climate modeling.
19
posted on
04/06/2020 5:17:49 AM PDT
by
Renkluaf
To: SeekAndFind
It is not just modelers that are the problem.
The real problem is having “official” modelers that are given the authority to be the only “experts” the government associates itself with.
The idea that merely by appointing person to “official” “expert” positions imbues those persons with an automatically superior position, in terms of their “expert” opinions, is illogical and irrational. And it is dangerous.
It is better to nurture an environment of many private “experts” with no “official” government association, allowing officials to hear diverse and opposing views before making decisions.
20
posted on
04/06/2020 6:53:16 AM PDT
by
Wuli
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