Neil Ferguson should be held accountable

[Mumlove5]

... for causing mass hysteria and panic with his grossly overestimated pessimistic model. The man that caused the 2020 global economic collapse over a death rate similar to that of a severe seasonal flu.

I don’t read the DM much but this article struck a cord.
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8163587/PETER-HITCHENS-Great-Panic-foolish-freedom-broken-economy-crippled.html

“ Crucially, those who began by claiming that we faced half a million deaths from the coronavirus in this country have now greatly lowered their estimate. Professor Neil Ferguson was one of those largely responsible for the original panic. He or others from Imperial college have twice revised his terrifying prophecy, first to fewer than 20,000 and then on Friday to 5,700.

He says intensive care units will probably cope. And he conceded a point made by critics of the panic policy – that two-thirds of people who die from coronavirus in the next nine months would most likely have died this year from other causes.

He tried to claim that the shutdown of the country had led to this violent backtrack, claiming that it was ‘social distancing strategies’ which had brought about his amazing climbdown. How could he possibly know either that this had happened, or that it would happen, or that there was any connection between the two?

It is very hard to see by what means he could know any of these things. Could he have softened his stance because of the publication early last week of a rival view, from distinguished scientists at Oxford University, led by Sunetra Gupta, Professor of theoretical epidemiology? It suggests that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment.

The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all. Millions may already have had it.

This report is being unfairly sneered at by Government toadies, but we shall see. It seems unlikely that Oxford University would have bungled their work.

And it is obvious that a few days of raggedly enforced house arrest could not have made so much real difference. Even those who believe in these shutdowns think they take two weeks to have any effect.”

www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

en.globes.co.il/en/article-lockdown-lunacy-1001322696

Mumlove5 Mon 30-Mar-20 11:03:32
" People are now saying Neil F grossly overestimated the deaths with his original model if we did nothing... which caused mass hysteria and panic. It should be reviewed and questioned"

Impressive sources, OP.

He is one of the main reasons why we’re in this mess.

Errr no I think you'll find it's CV that's done that.

What, we can’t ask questions about his model?

There is a whole team of people asking questions, not just the IC team but all over the world (IC have published unusually in several different languages). You, however and Peter Hitchens, with your sum total of fuck all knowledge and experience categorically CANNOT question. Largely because you don't know what to question. Because you know fuck all about pandemic modelling.

Sorry, but silencing others with a different opinion and view is scary territory.

Could you explain your qualifications, the extent of your research, and its methodology, please, OP? Not all opinions are equally valid. Same goes for the opinions of those whose articles you link to. What scientific qualifications does Peter Hitchens have? He’s not even an investigative journalist, just a deeply ideological columnist.

"As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night,"

Christ, I missed him saying this

We must all run and HIDE .....

OP I think you've missed the bit where coronavirus became a religion. It's like Brexit. You can't question whether total penury for a decade is worth it. It's....a cause. In fact the longer this goes on, the more I fear that comments like yours will quite literally be censored. The FT (which is definitely not the DM) this morning did raise the fact that the average death rate in the the UK between January and March is 150,000. So it's certainly worth asking how proportionate the response is, when the modelling that led to it is far from fact. Yes, we should so something, but I do think we're going a bit collectively nuts. Why not just cancel all events, matches, basically everything indoors, continue mandate to WFH for office work, and limit footfall in shops. That should be enough.

Are you a professor in this field OP?
Or are you sitting on the sofa with a copy of the DM in front of you?

"silencing others with a different opinion and view is scary territory."

Correcting facts or disagreeing with the opinion of a poster is NOT "silencing"

.... unless that poster is a very delicate snowflake indeed

People are now saying Neil F grossly overestimated the deaths with his original model if we did nothing... which caused mass hysteria and panic. It should be reviewed and questioned*

This is quite simply incorrect - you need to look at what all of the leading scientists with relevant expertise are saying, all of the relevant data, to form a view.

I apologise for losing my sh*t in an earlier post and saying "This is not difficult to understand" - that was rude of me.

I'd rather put my trust in a highly experienced team of epidemiologists, some of the very best in the world, over Peter hitchens in the daily mail Yes, I agree. And also the frontline doctors all over the world who said isolate before the govmt required it.

His initial projection was that Covid-19 would claim the lives of 500,000 people in the UK

Yes - if nothing was done Something has been done so it'll be lower.

Belarus isn't doing anything - let's see what happens there OP shall we?

People are now saying Neil F grossly overestimated the deaths with his original model if we did nothing... which caused mass hysteria and panic. It should be reviewed and questioned

This is quite simply incorrect - you need to look at what all of the leading scientists with relevant expertise are saying, all of the relevant data, to form a view.

I apologise for losing my sh*t in an earlier post and saying "This is not difficult to understand" - that was rude of me.

I'd rather put my trust in a highly experienced team of epidemiologists, some of the very best in the world, over Peter hitchens in the daily mail Yes, I agree. And also the frontline doctors all over the world who said isolate before the govmt required it.

Oh stop bullying the OP. She's entitled to her opinion even if you don't agree.

Could you explain your qualifications, the extent of your research, and its methodology, please, OP? pathetic
Asking for the

Not qualified to judge the question of whether the model is the best possible model that scientists could have produced with limited time and data of uncertain value. It's possible that all attempts to model this virus are doomed to error at the moment, which doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing exactly what we ARE doing (safest option), only that any estimates of the number of deaths under this or other scenarios have to be understood as unconfident predictions. Basically we have to keep on doing what we are doing for a while, a) so behaviour of virus can be better understood, b) so NHS not overwhelmed, c) to buy time for better antiviral treatments and eventually a vaccine, d) until we're able to identify people who have antibodies and are immune (and how long that immunity lasts for etc).

On Neil Ferguson personally: the one thing I do find troubling is his reluctance to release his thousands of lines of undocumented 13+ year old C code (as he put it). I don't have a problem with Microsoft 'refactoring' it to make the model more useable. But in basic interests of openness and transparency, doesn't the original code (which produced the model which led to the government policy) need to be released too? I'm in a different academic field and was surprised that releasing code for peer review ALONGSIDE the papers it informs isn't common practice!

liberoncolours

Prof Neil Ferguson in the Guardian today:

"Ferguson, whose modelling informed the government’s decision to impose a lockdown, said the data was showing signs that social distancing measures were beginning to work although it has not yet had an effect on the number of daily reported deaths.

It’s only been a week of full lockdown. People are now asking maybe hand washing and some social distancing was enough? Keeping the vulnerable and elderly safe is also key. Sweden is doing this.

Sweden is really interesting.

@hopsalong

You’re right. I read somewhere he said “it’s all in my head and need to get it on paper” or something like that.

Tonyaster disagreeing with someone and pointing out the lack of any scientific underpinning of their position is not bullying.

"He or others from Imperial college have twice revised his terrifying prophecy, first to fewer than 20,000 and then on Friday to 5,700."

It wasn't he (him) it was an engineer (completely different department and not an epidemiologist) who came up with that number and in any case they have since said that the data now shows the figure to be 20 to 30k.

Hitchens clearly had no understanding of how modelling works and if you read his Twitter feed he is very selectively cherry picking views which match his own and ignoring all others.

Questioning things is a good thing, but you need to have an idea of what you are questioning and why and Hitchens clearly doesn't.

@Mumlove5 just for future reference although you are right to question (or rather, still entitled to), please don't use RT for any such purpose. If you didn't know, they are the Kremlin's propaganda machine, so all you're doing is spreading whatever disinformation is in Putin's interests, and his interests are complex and very rarely aligned with ours.

It’s only been a week of full lockdown. People are now asking maybe hand washing and some social distancing was enough?
Not according to all the leading scientists and frontline doctors, OP. And you need to bear in mind that we do not yet know what will happen, this is all positive but we need to wait and see how many more people get ill, and what the virus does, over the next few weeks. There are some amazing links from good sources on other threads, I'd go through them and read up/listen up on it.

pointythings

Calling the OP "thick", assuming she must have an agenda and aggressively demanding to see her "methodology" is bullying.

I don’t know who Hitchens is. People are asking similar questions which is why I posted his article.

OP you are spreading disinformation.

Not sure whether this is deliberate or due to lack of critical thinking.

"please don't use RT for any such purpose
If you didn't know, they are the Kremlin's propaganda machine, so all you're doing is spreading whatever disinformation is in Putin's interests, and his interests are complex and very rarely aligned with ours."

^This

Tootletum you speak a lot of sense. I maybe wrong but I thought the UK death rate ran at around 600 000 people annually. Draconian measures in some aspects may reduce that by tens of thousands but we don't do them for various reasons. A critical analysis should be applied to all measures we take.
There is no cure or vaccine for corovid 19, almost all people will get it, only some badly and I have not seen many good stats on the effectiveness of hospital treatment. These are all things which need consideration.