Uplifting

Even your crusty old Blogista is a better man for this: tip'o'th'tiplo hat to Duff & Nonsense!

Ask Uncle Neil

What a track record, here summarised by the Business Insider:

Michael Thrusfield, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the paper he had "déjà vu" after reading the Imperial paper, saying Ferguson was responsible for excessive animal culling during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak.Ferguson warned the government that 150,000 people could die. Six million animals were slaughtered as a precaution, costing the country billions in farming revenue. In the end, 200 people died. 

Similarly, he was accused of creating panic by overestimating the potential death toll during the 2005 Bird Flu outbreak. Ferguson estimated 200 million could die. The real number was in the low hundreds.  

In 2009, one of Ferguson's models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu outbreak in the UK — the final figure was below 500. 

On March 16, around a month after the earlier interview, Ferguson delivered a bombshell 20-page paper to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.The message was clear: 510,000 people could die if the government didn't abandon its current strategy of allowing the disease to spread.

The obvious riposte is that the predictions are so insanely off-scale because the Government reacted by, say, trying to kill every farm animal in Britain or demolish the UK economy as a prophylactic measure.

On another view the Government would have done equally well to consult a Panel of defrocked palm readers, bankrupt bookies, Mayan Prophecies mavens... the Flat Earth Society! David Icke (pbuh)! God knows there are plenty of loonies and losers in the UK with a better track record than Prof Pantsdown who might at least have lent some gaiety to the proceedings.




Pictured today: Covids thwarted by the lockdown policy

Ask Uncle Vlad

The Worthy People of Britain: Vladimir Il'ich, Comrade Professor Lockdown has been caught breaching his own lockdown to have... relations. Isn't that a bad thing?










Dyadya Vlad: One who talks a right-wing government into sabotaging its own economy and wrecking millions of livelihoods with it, doesn't merit a legover or two?
Hero of the Soviet-Union-on-Sea, overfulfil your quota with plenary zeal!





The Suddenly Worth One Hell Of A Lot Less But Haven't Twigged Yet People of Britain: Vladimir Il'ich, how did he achieve such a feat?









Vlad the Advisor: Well, that's a toughie, there's nothing in my experience... you know, Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, Piotr Durnovo... the Tsar's governments usually had at least one member who wasn't a complete putz...

Armchair Epidemiologists, Eh?

But then

Professor Michael Levitt, who teaches structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

And according to Levitt, coronavirus data show that sweeping lockdown measures were an overreaction that may actually backfire. 

Levitt has been analysing the COVID-19 outbreak from a statistical perspective since January and has been remarkably accurate in his predications. The data show that the outbreak never actually grew exponentially, suggesting harsh lockdown measures, which have drastically impacted the world economy, were probably unnecessary.

His observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes "sub-exponential".
This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The 'unmitigated' scenarios modelled by (among others) Imperial College, and which tilted governments across the world into drastic action, relied on a presumption of continued exponential growth — that with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate, very quickly the majority of the population would be infected and huge numbers of deaths would be recorded. But Professor Levitt's point is that that hasn't actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.

[...]"I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn't practise too much lockdown and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity,"

Linkeroney: tip'o'th'tiplo hat to Blaze for this one, emphases mine own.
he's only a "structural biologist", that hasn't got any epibolo edipomel epidobro whatchamabob in it anywhere so what would he know?

And but then, fisticuffs over whether there ever was any evidence suggesting that "continued exponential growth" might be on the cards at all, are unlikely to break out any time soon, simply too abstruse for a good punch-up.

And but then again at the time nobody kneeeewwww... and when you don't know the scale of a risk you might be facing, blind panic is the only rational course. By the time you've got the O's of the OODA loop under way, th'Covids will already be taking all the jobs, opening corner shops, marrying your daughter etc.

A Mad World, My Masters

A Very British Disaster

Lies, Damned Lies and

an excellent article from Dr John Lee in the Spectator, How deadly is the coronavirus? It's still far from clear, a rare instance of sanity in these topsy-turvy times:

Governments everywhere say they are responding to the science. The policies in the UK are not the government’s fault. They are trying to act responsibly based on the scientific advice given. But governments must remember that rushed science is almost always bad science. We have decided on policies of extraordinary magnitude without concrete evidence of excess harm already occurring, and without proper scrutiny of the science used to justify them.

South Korea and Sweden (are there others?*) do not seem to have sought refuge in lunacy. Maybe on the other side of this a reader will wonder, where? oh, where all the dead guys are, but I am waiting rather for the deluge of self-exculpatory bullshit from our own Authorities when the reckoning is presented.











Maybe by that time, "non-essential" carping will have become a criminal offence, and there will be no need for such a deluge.

*Update: and the Taiwanese, who have a sensible Government; the South Koreans because they are a democracy; the Swedes because...