//NJ the mantra is "Stay at Home-Protect the NHS-Save Lives. The thought behind it, to flatten the curve, and thus ensure that there was enough critical care for those who needed it, was clearly explained many many many times.//
Clearly not to Transport for London, woofy. Perhaps Mayor Khan was not at the briefing:
https://tfl.gov.uk/
//Chalk and cheese. For a start ...//
I imagine the people who ran the ICL model for Sweden knew the difference between that chalk and cheese and adapted the model accordingly. It certainly seems so from the information in the link kindly provided by Gromit.
One of the assumptions made by Professor Ferguson when he produced his Domesday scenario for the UK was that 81% of the UK population would contract the disease. This does not seem to be borne out by the experience on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. There some 3,700 passengers and crew were banged up for a fortnight in very confined conditions but only 17% tested positive.
But anyway, let’s give the Prof a break. This is an unprecedented situation and he’d had little experience in such matters. Or had he?
The first entry in his record of service book came in 2001. Then he persuaded the Blair government to order the pre-emptive destruction of 6.5m animals, based on his modelling of the foot & mouth outbreak. The University of Edinburgh later described his model as “not fit for purpose.”
A year later he turned his attention to vCJD (“Mad Cow Disease”). He forecast up to 50,000 deaths, maybe up to 150,000 if the disease spread to sheep. The total death from that condition to date is 178.
He then turned his attention to Bird Flu. He never produced a formal forecast but hazarded a guess that it could be up to 200m worldwide. I haven't got details of the outcome but I think I would have remembered had it been that high.
2009 gave him the chance to give advice on the outbreak of “Swine ‘Flu”. He made a flawed assumption on the mortality rate and forecast 65,000 deaths. There were 283.
I cannot understand how a man who has shown time and again a predilection to get things so spectacularly wrong continued to have the ear of government. He is clearly a charlatan and his “error of judgement” in inviting his lover to visit him contrary to the law may have done the country a favour. His latest advice to the UK government has seen them take action which will absolutely cripple the economy for years to come and I hope that Professor Ferguson is never again in a position to provide his “expert” advice. Hopefully the remainder of his team are a little more competent.
Thanks all for the contributions. BA to Gromit for digging out the AIER report. A couple of telling passages:
“And the overall death toll of the baseline “do nothing” scenario appears to have little grounding in reality.”
“But the Swedish adaptation paints an underwhelming picture of its predictive ability, especially given that those predictions formed a primary basis of the US and UK policy responses.”