Do As I Say, Not As I Do Liberalism at its almost worst.
best news of the pandemic. bye Mr. Lockdown:
3 Apr: Nature: Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19
How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic.
by David Adam
An earlier version of the Imperial (College London/Neil Ferguson) model, for instance, estimated that SARS-CoV-2 would be about as severe as influenza in necessitating the hospitalization of those infected. That turned out to be incorrect...
The true performance of simulations in this pandemic might become clear only months or years from now...
“Forecasts made during an outbreak are rarely investigated during or after the event for their accuracy, and only recently have forecasters begun to make results, code, models and data available for retrospective analysis,” (John Edmunds, who is a modeller at the LSHTM) and his team noted last year in a paper6 that assessed the performance of forecasts made in a 2014–15 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone...
Media reports have suggested that an update to the Imperial team’s model in early March was a critical factor in jolting the UK government into changing its policy on the pandemic. The researchers initially estimated that 15% of hospital cases would need to be treated in an intensive-care unit (ICU), but then updated that to 30%, a figure used in the first public release of their work on 16 March...
Ferguson says the significance of the model update might have been exaggerated...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6
25 Apr: Business Insider: How ‘Professor Lockdown’ helped save tens of thousands of lives worldwide — and carried COVID-19 into Downing Street
by Bill Bostock
Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, authored a paper that prompted the UK to scrap its coronavirus strategy.
Ferguson’s team warned Boris Johnson that the quest for “herd immunity” could cost 510,000 lives, prompting an abrupt U-turn.
His simulations have been influential in other countries as well, cited by authorities in the US, Germany, and France...
On March 23, the UK scrapped “herd immunity” in favor of a suppression strategy, and the country made preparations for weeks of lockdown. Ferguson’s study was responsible...
The White House received the paper two days before it was made public...
Scientists have piled in to criticize Ferguson’s paper in less uncertain terms.
“Some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated,” John Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention from Stanford University, told The Telegraph...
https://www.businessinsider.com/neil-ferguson-transformed-uk-covid-response-oxford-challenge-imperial-model-2020-4?r=AU&IR=T