> I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19.
> This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.
> My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place.
> Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).
[1] https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928
[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-n...
The Professor is correct that his study essentially recommended (and caused) the nationwide house arrest now implemented, and that this is why he's now estimating far fewer deaths.
At the same time I wouldn't pick that study as a hill to die on. It has flaws that are severe and obvious to any layman and probably more that aren't, e.g.
• The assumption of mass deaths was based on constant NHS capacity for a year. That assumption is obviously false, the NHS managed to double ICU capacity within a week or so just by converting wards and now they're building emergency hospitals, China style.
• They used hospitalisation and fatality rates calculated from Italy, although the problems with biased sampling there are well discussed.
• They applied no discount rate learned from prior SARS outbreaks, where the final CFR turned out to be far lower than initial estimates, even though it's clear that the same will happen this time.
• When people asked for their source code the good professor announced it was of such low quality he couldn't release it until Microsoft had rewritten it for him.
• It mixes up excess mortality with incidental mortality. The UK has the same problem as Italy, where deaths that involve COVID-19 are being reported and counted as caused by it (because it's on the 'notifiable diseases' list). A shift in distributions is being reported as deaths that would never have happened otherwise, which isn't the case. And the ICL team know this because the professor blithely stated that of the 20,000 predicted deaths, probably 2/3rds would have happened anyway. Why was this rate not applied in the study given that excess mortality is obviously what people care about?
Right now it's really hard to feel confidence in any epidemiological output. This field feels more like psychology or economics than physics or microbiology.
You should also mention the Oxford study also mentioned in the article if you want to maintain some semblance of unbiased opinion: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Mod...
That study suggests that _because_ the virus is more transmissible, and because most people do not have symptoms, a ton of people had it already without paying much attention. Think about it. If it's so transmissible as the "walked back" estimate suggests, wouldn't the UK, which implemented isolation measures only very recently, and which pretty much _lives_ in the pubs, be very, very fucked right now? And it's not fucked. 162 cases per million, only 163 people in critical condition, 9 deaths per million (flu, for instance, claims 142 people per million in the US), although I'm sure the numbers will go up significantly before they are out of the woods.
Moreover, after restrictions were partially lifted in China and Korea and people were put back to work the epidemic did not restart there. This does not line up at all with the initial "we're all gonna die" rhetoric.