Commentary from Kevin Dayaratna on The Daily Signal.com (May 16):
Professor Neil Ferguson, who led the COVID-19 modeling team at Imperial College in London, resigned May 5 from his government advisory role after breaking the very same British lockdown rules that he had a role in influencing.
Ferguson led the Imperial College team that designed the computer model that, among others, had been used to justify the recent stay-at-home orders in England as well as in the United States. We now know the model was so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with.
Epidemiology—the study of the incidence, prevalence, and impact of disease—frequently calls upon models to forecast potential outcomes of diseases. Not surprisingly, once COVID-19 became a pandemic, policy experts from all across the world began relying on such models.
The Imperial College researchers ran one such model they had used in prior research and forecast a number of potential outcomes, including that, by October, more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID-19.
The model also predicted the United States could incur up to 1 million deaths even with “enhanced social distancing” guidelines, including “shielding the elderly.” Imperial’s modeling results influenced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a nationwide lockdown and influenced the White House as well.
I asked Ferguson and his colleagues for their model on multiple occasions to see how they got their numbers, but they never replied to my emails.
According to Nature, they had been “working with Microsoft to tidy up the code and make it available.” I also asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the codes it used to develop its COVID-19 forecasts, but got no response. [read more]
The shutdown was a bad idea. It should never be repeated. It didn’t slow down the virus. If anything it sped up the spread. Virus don’t like sunshine and fresh air—they don’t spread as well.
Other articles on the matter:
- Doctors raise alarm about health effects of continued coronavirus shutdown: 'Mass casualty incident'
- Stanford coronavirus research: Did politically-motivated scientists hype their speedy study?
- Viruses 101: How Overprotecting People from COVID 19 Could Make it More Lethal
- Driverless Cars Will Make the Next Pandemic Crackdown Complete
- 'The Pretense of Knowledge' has Cost America Dearly
- The Wuhan Virus Reminds Us: Beware Scientism and the Technocrats
- The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History
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