2020-12-24

This is something I wrote back in May when the truth came out about Prof Ferguson's Imperial College model that was the prime cause of the first Lockdowns in both the UK and the USA:

The Imperial College Model

(07/05/2020) Latest news about the Imperial College model (that predicted over half a million UK deaths and persuaded Boris to lock-down the nation) has surfaced (16/05/2020 - the Telegraph finally catches up with this situation - although they hid it under "Tech"!).

IC have released a sanitized version of their code, previously never made public, for peer review.

A seasoned IT professional has published her review here.

As a seasoned IT professional (since 1966) myself, I relate very much to her findings - if her comments are a true reflection of Prof. Ferguson's modelling then it cannot be considered reliable - period.

By IC's own admission it had been developed over many years (ie: grown like Topsy), had become difficult to maintain, and was unfit for publication. It was of totally unsuitable quality for the purpose for which it was being used. If such a model is required then a proper specification should be drawn up and a new model developed and tested to latest methods and standards.

My feeling however is that in trying to model so many different aspects of our national life and to pull all these together into a single humungous whole, it may never in practice catch up with ever-developing reality. How could it's continued relevance to our real and changing world ever be adequately tested and verified (prior to the next pandemic)?

It is time that we treated our academics and scientists as the flawed human beings that we all are, and stopped deifying them as the all-knowing scientists that we know they cannot be.

It's worth reminding ourselves that even after three months of Coronavirus (which emerged in China in December) our "scientists" (root: Latin, scio, I know) still cannot agree on whether recovery from covid-19 confers immunity.

Go figure.