We'll be seeing many more stories like this when the panic subside.
/
Just kidding
Or maybe we won’t; the politicians and their media tools will be desperate to claim that only the shutdown spared us from global destruction.
The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.
Professor Neil Ferguson’s computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on”.
The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.
“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”
Earlier: What Neil Ferguson’s Booty Call Tells Us About Modern Politics.
The maddening thing about this entire debacle is that Neil Ferguson is a buffoon who has been pulling numbers and models from his rear end for 20 years and has been wrong for twenty years. His peers are no better and no more believable, whether opining on flu viruses or global warming.
We have now met the Imperial College London epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology Neil Ferguson — the “gold standard” of disease modeling, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. Ferguson is of course the expert whose projections of huge death tolls from COVID-19 in the United States and the United Kingdom have supported the ongoing shutdowns. Ferguson projected as many as 2,200,000 deaths in the United States and 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom.
Looking back at that Guardian article, Bill observes that Ferguson has a record of making stupid worst-case predictions about the threat of new viruses. Bill cites “what Prof. Gold Standard said in 2005 about the projected Bird Flu death toll to the Guardian”:
Last month Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told Guardian Unlimited that up to 200 million people could be killed.
“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”
A Department of Health contingency plan states anywhere that there could be between 21,500 and 709,000 deaths in Britain.”
The Bird Flu’s death toll from 2003 to 2020 is 455.
Dr. Ferguson was equally off with his death projections for mad cow disease. He made big headlines in the United Kingdom by predicting that mad cow disease could kill between 50 and 50,000. Bill writes: “Millions of cows were slaughtered. But to be fair, his scientific ‘model’ was right. The death toll [is 178 to date].”
Among the British publications that have recently drawn attention to Dr. Ferguson’s record are The Sun and The Telegraph.
The Washington Post reported on the Ferguson effect in the current crisis in “A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies.” The New York Times reported on the Ferguson effect in the story “Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action.” Subhead: “It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.” Given Dr. Ferguson’s record, however, the numbers should probably have been questioned if not discounted precisely because of the source.
