Free Republic

Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday. Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson has changed his tune, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured....

Government policy and guidance crafted in an effort to “flatten the curve” of coronavirus-related deaths has largely been based upon an Imperial College London model headed by Professor Neil Ferguson. The terrifying model shows that as many as 2.2 million Americans could perish from the virus if no action is taken, peaking in June. However, that model is likely highly flawed, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues. Professor Gupta lead a team of researchers at Oxford University in a modeling study which suggests that the virus has been invisibly spreading for at least a month earlier than suspected, concluding that as...

The United States, as a whole, is roughly two weeks away from reaching the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, but the peaks for individual states will vary, with most occurring over the next four weeks, according to projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). When it comes to the arrival of the coronavirus, not all states are facing the same timeline. Some states, like New York and Louisiana, have quickly become epicenters of the virus in the United States and, as a result, will reach a resource peak weeks sooner than states like Kentucky...

My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model, however good but founded on past data, was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past. As governments struggle with their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the $64 trillion question is "which past does the future look like?"Science writes how models have become supremely important: Entire cities and countries have been locked down based on hastily done forecasts that often haven't been peer reviewed.  ... The Netherlands ... Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected “working endlessly to contain...