Telling your friend they’re about to be hit by a bus will usually force them out of the way. If they came up to you afterwards and said, “Hey, that bus didn’t hit me! You’re a liar!” you’d probably be pretty peeved.
You’d probably also wish you hadn’t told them a bus was about to hit them.
Enter the throngs of internet people, who today have seized on re-reporting and mis-reporting of comments made by Professor Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College London – one of the world’s leading authorities on the spread of the coronavirus.
The Imperial model has been pretty clear since its original report on March 16th: do nothing and hundreds of thousands in the UK will die. Do something and we can lower it. Do everything and we can almost entirely avoid catastrophe.
On the basis of this, many nations concurred, and did “everything” possible to avoid getting hit by the coronavirus as hard as Wuhan, or Italy, or Spain.
The study said we could “flatten the curve” if there was case isolation, household quarantine, if we closed schools and universities, and if we implemented “social distancing”.
So we did.
Now, however, our friends are calling us liars because they weren’t hit by the bus.
Outlets such as the Daily Wire and Daily Caller claimed on Thursday: “The doctor behind a U.K. college study that painted a doomsday scenario over the coronavirus pandemic now says he holds a more optimistic view about the spread in the U.K.”
This is simply false.
Not only were the lower numbers always a part of the Imperial modeling, going back to when it was released in mid-March, but he also made this abundantly clear in his testimony to the British Parliament on Wednesday.
Here’s what Ferguson told the UK’s Science and Technology Committee:
Ferguson, appearing via videolink, explained: “We assessed in that report on the 16th of March that fatalities would be probably not likely to exceed 20,000 with effectively a lockdown and intense social distancing strategy”.
And that is precisely what happened.
So far from the model being disproven, or revised, the evidence from the past few weeks actually proves the Imperial model correct.
And proves the naysayers – unfortunately many of whom (like us) are in the right-leaning media – wrong.
Now they want you to compensate them because the bus never hit them.
Next time, maybe no one will warn.
UPDATE:
Imperial’s Prof. Ferguson confirms that indeed, they are not running from their original report, as some commentators have claimed:
1/4 – 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.
— neil_ferguson (@neil_ferguson) March 26, 2020
2/4 -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.
— neil_ferguson (@neil_ferguson) March 26, 2020
3/4 – 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.
— neil_ferguson (@neil_ferguson) March 26, 2020
4/4 – 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).
— neil_ferguson (@neil_ferguson) March 26, 2020
