Didn’t Imperial College make some predictions back in March? Were they accurate?
No. But they will be credited as preventing the prediction by making the predictions.
the insanity continues in Australia. in some States 50 people can go into a pub (bar), but only 10 can go into a church, etc.
27 May: Sydney Morning Herald: Thousands of predicted COVID-19 deaths never eventuated - was it poor modelling or our response?
By Dana McCauley and Jennifer Duke
Australia’s policymakers were in March bracing for up to 150,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic as the virus spread globally and health officials warned that hospitals might not be able to cope.
Ten weeks later, with just 103 COVID-19 deaths, some experts say the modelling behind the national cabinet’s decisions was flawed and some commentators say the response went too far.
When Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a ban on mass gatherings of more than 500 people on March 13, Australians seeing widespread lockdowns imposed overseas began to ask for the modelling that lay behind the national cabinet’s decisions.
Two days later, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly was quizzed about the expected numbers at a press conference in Canberra, and he laid out an astonishing scenario, saying the number of infections could range between 20 per cent to 60 per cent of the population.
“The death rate is around 1 per cent. You can do the maths,” Professor Kelly said, urging the public to avoid large gatherings. The maths worked out to between 50,000 and 150,000 deaths.
On Tuesday Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy told the Senate inquiry into the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic that Australia had avoided 14,000 deaths by implementing strict social distancing measures, considerably fewer than the initial warning...
Prime Minister Scott Morrison made it clear when he launched the modelling that it “does not model the Australian response”, and the figures were based on a combination of Chinese and international data as Australian community transmission was too low to give a full and accurate model...
The 60 per cent spread was a scenario being discussed by global health experts and governments in March after the United Kingdom’s Imperial College released its controversial “herd immunity” modelling, which sparked debate over whether the virus should be allowed to spread.
Professor Kelly attributed the 60 per cent figure to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the lower estimate of 20 per cent to NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant...
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/thousands-of-predicted-covid-19-deaths-never-eventuated-was-it-poor-modelling-or-our-response-20200527-p54wsn.html
Australian Lockdown announced 13 March; Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch on 3 March, when he revised down the FakeFigs he gave on a media call 22 Feb.
Tweet: Marc Lipsitch, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Because I am now less certain of where the R0 will end up (and how it may vary geographically) I am going to revise downward the range of outcomes I consider plausible to 20%-60% of adults infected. This involves subjectivity about what range of R0 may turn out to be true.
3 March 2020
To preempt the critique that the earlier figures were alarmist: I update my beliefs when the available data change, as any rational person would do. The available data are pointing to a different (and better) outcome than before. So I’m updating...
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?lang=en
22 Feb: WaPo: Coronavirus outbreak edges closer to pandemic status
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Lena H. Sun, William Wan and Joel Achenbach; Min Joo Kim in Seoul, Amanda Coletta in Washington and Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch estimates that 40 to 70 percent ***of the human population could potentially be infected by the virus if it becomes pandemic. Not all of those people would get sick, he noted. The estimated death rate attributed to covid-19 — roughly 2 in 100 confirmed infections — may also drop over time as researchers get a better understanding of how widely the virus has spread...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-outbreak-edges-closer-to-pandemic/2020/02/21/03afafc0-5429-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html
Lipsitch was more even more extreme than Imperial.
rough figs for his worst-case scenario:
5.32 billion could get infected worldwide.
86 million deaths worldwide
6.6 million US deaths
of course, he revised down and revised down his predictions again and again, but who was listening?