Our passport to freedom Photo: Dominic Lipinski - WPA Pool/Getty
Britain’s pundits and experts (many moonlight as both) haven’t covered themselves in glory with their predictions throughout the pandemic. We have heard assertions that the UK had already reached herd immunity so there’d be no cases left by Christmas; forecasts that the infection fatality rate would be as low as 1 in 10,000; expectations from MPs that the virus would just go away on its own due to the Gompertz curve; or that there would never be a Covid vaccine. All of these were completely wrong, and all helped sow confusion, delaying decisions and making the virus harder to tackle in the long run.
This cacophony of almost random forecasts isn’t unique to public commentary on viruses – almost any area of national debate is drowning in confident predictions, very few of which have much value. Most of those you read suffer from one of two problems: the forecaster probably isn’t telling you what they really think, and even if they were, what they think might not be any good.
Accuracy, even among professional forecasters like intelligence analysts, has often been a target rather than an achievement. So anyone trying to work out who to listen to in order to understand the future always had their work cut out for them.
That’s why in 2011 the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity agency, IARPA, invested in a massive forecasting competition to try and make concrete improvements. Teams would compete to forecast hundreds of topics over four years, from a range of subjects in different countries, with the winning strategies studied and shared with the wider intelligence world.
The bestselling book Superforecasting went on to describe the techniques used by the winning team (of which I was a member) in that competition. We didn’t get everything right, but we learned that it’s possible to do a lot better than foreign policy experts by moving away from the traditional methods employed.
There were three key structural lessons from the competition:
- Keep score
- Identify the best forecasters
- Work as a team
The most important item on this list is keep score. Most forecasts that we come across in the media are made by in-house pundits or people rung up by television stations or newspapers for a quote, and these aren’t scored – there’s no penalty for being wrong most of the time. Old articles are rarely revisited and if they are, the pundit can normally wave away criticism and continue along the same line. Some pundits have made a career out of political analysis despite consistently being wrong in their predictions.
If there’s no reward for getting things right, then accuracy will drop down the list of incentives behind the forecasts. Instead pundits will say what they think will cheer people up, what will promote their career via wacky, attention-grabbing predictions, what shows loyalty to their friends or signals political values and ideals to others — or any of the million other reasons someone might predict something without actually expecting it to happen.
It’s not just that pundits and others in the public eye are bad at predicting, they’re mostly not even trying to. And these predictions can influence politicians and decision makers.
The way to build a successful forecasting system is to reward people for accurate forecasts and disincentivise bad ones. Just that little step, of keeping score and letting everyone know at the start that what they say will matter, immediately changes everything. Now when someone is tempted to predict great success for a project led by their pal, they might think about how embarrassed they’ll be if it goes wrong, and drop their confidence.
Once people are actually trying to predict accurately, you can move on to step two — feedback. Scorekeeping doesn’t just incentivise people to be honest, it also gives them the opportunity to improve. Once you know what you’ve got right and got wrong, you can go back and review. As forecasts resolve, people tend to get better calibrated – that is, there develops a closer relationship between their confidence in their forecast and the outcome.
And once you have a regular run of forecasts, you can take one of the most important steps — stop listening to people who can’t or won’t predict accurately, and pay attention to the most accurate team members, the “superforecasters”.
One of our most striking findings was that the ability to forecast is a skill in itself, independent from subject matter knowledge. Successful forecasters aren’t perfect, of course, but a good track record of predictions is a strong indicator of future performance. And with these skills, superforecasters work for banks, governments and other organisations providing probability estimates for all kinds of risks as well as training analysts in forecasting.
In a system where forecasters are punished for getting it wrong and rewarded for getting it right, the most accurate people float to the top, and when they work together on a team, they become even more accurate.
The forecasts
Last week we gathered a small group of well-calibrated forecasters with good track records to look at the UK’s pandemic outlook over the next few months. With Britain facing both the worst period of the crisis but also an exit strategy with the vaccine roll-out, “when will this end?” is the most urgent question everyone is asking right now.
We can’t promise clairvoyance, but we made the best use of our team’s skills and produced the following set of estimates on three topics:
- How bad the daily death toll will get
- How many vaccines we’ll have administered at the end of February
- When daily deaths will first fall below 100
Superforecasters cannot predict exactly when the pandemic will be over, but these three questions act as proxies for the questions of how bad it will get, how soon an individual is likely to get a vaccine, and when the pandemic will recede. A double-digit daily death toll does not mean the end of the nightmare, but with large-scale vaccinations taking place it will certainly mean is in sight.
These forecasts are presented as the median estimate of the group; the principle of the “wisdom of crowds”, the idea first suggested by Francis Galton that the median of any large number of guesses will usually be fairly accurate, applies to experienced forecasters as much as anyone.
We also include our “80% confidence” interval as an expression of the uncertainty surrounding our forecast. For example, our central estimate that the death toll will peak at 1,278 with an 80% confidence interval of 892 to 5,750, means we think there’s only a 10% chance it’ll be less than 892 and only a 10% chance it’ll be greater than 5750. (The confidence intervals are represented by the blue rectangles, and the central estimates with the red lines.)
The worst of the pandemic
The median estimate of the group was for the 7-day average of daily deaths to peak at 1,278, but with an 80% confidence interval of 892 — 5,750
Alongside the predictions, we note down anonymous comments from the forecasters in the team to explain their reasoning. Among the notes accompanying this question, perhaps the most optimistic was that there is a “small chance we are at the peak now”.
On the other hand, the worst-case scenario is if the hospital system collapses and we are forced to “en mass palliate anyone over 60/65” and the most pessimistic predicted 5,000 deaths a day. The big factors were new virus strains and “poorly managed vaccination centres causing infections among the most vulnerable and highest priority population”.
However, with 160,000 infections a day currently in the UK and a fatality rate just below 1%, 1,400 deaths a day seems likely.
Another forecaster also predicted that a third wave was “likely” once the current lockdown ended, “with quite possibly the highest caseload yet, but [was] unlikely to have as many fatalities due to prioritised vaccination of elderly and otherwise-vulnerable” individuals.
A lot of this depends on whether the vaccine protects against any new strains, and how quickly those vaccines are rolled out.
The February Vaccine Target
Millions of people are currently waiting for a letter informing them of their vaccination appointment, a jab that will end a year of house arrest and often extreme anxiety. The Prime Minister has promised two million jabs a week, and tens of thousands of lives, and millions of livelihoods, depend on getting the jabs out as soon as possible.
We asked the team to forecast how many vaccine doses will have been administered in the UK by the end of February and the central estimate was 12 million, with an 80% confidence interval of 6 million to 20 million.
Among the big questions are the supply and how much political pressure there will be for the distribution network to move faster. Two more vaccines, by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, are also expected to get approval next month and that will also increase supply.
One forecaster predicted that “Boris’s current target was 13 million for end of February: best guess is they undershoot that slightly and ramp-up only really gets going in March/April…. this has been the consistent pattern of undershooting a bit throughout the pandemic.”
So with a median estimate of 12 million, you can find out when you and your loved ones are likely to receive theirs here.
In which month will deaths fall below 100 a day?
By estimating when deaths fall below 100 a day we can get some idea of when the virus is close to beaten.
Our group estimated April as the most likely month for daily deaths to fall below this level, with an 80% confidence interval of March to August.
Among the key unknowns are new strains, and also whether hospitals get overwhelmed “which results in cascading preventable deaths”. We can estimate when deaths will fall based on first wave patterns, when it took “two and a half months to get from 1k per day to below 100 in the March-July lockdown”, although the vaccination programme might accelerate that. Generally speaking, it takes about three weeks to half the deaths, and so following an expected peak in January, death rates will half four times by late April.
At this point, one forecaster suggests, the government will open up the economy and deaths will continue around 100 a day because this will be regarded as tolerable. Another believes this figure may continue until September, by which time a combination of vaccination and infection will have introduced herd immunity.
The most “optimistic” forecast suggested that we may have got deaths down by March but that might be because “we screw up” and “have killed everyone who could possibly die from it and therefore the virus has nowhere else to go”.
The most pessimistic suggested: “If there is a less successful vaccination programme, multiple policy errors such as keeping schools open once teachers have been vaccinated but not paying attention to cases/repeated attempted opening up, or mutations of the virus, then it might be December before deaths get below this level.”
But another thought that new drugs — the most recent breakthroughs came late last week — will have reduced the fatality rate fairly soon.
January and February 2021 are going to be very traumatic months for tens of thousands of people in the UK. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and if you’re worried about the next few weeks you might want to gain a better estimate of how bad it will get, when your vaccine will come, and most importantly when the nightmare will be over.
And perhaps next time that Britain faces a crisis of this magnitude, we’ll have systems in place that incentivise people to tell the truth, identifying those with strong track records of forecasting, rather than turning to those who tell us what we want to hear.
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SubscribeOne reason that deaths have shot up, is the huge number of tests taken before and since Christmas, which are now coming into the death stats.
When a tested person dies they end up in the stats.
If you count people with five fingers on each hand, and then count how many of them died, the number dying will be proportional to the number you are counting.
If you were to put a statistic out on the numebr of people with colds who die within the next 28 days, what do you think that graph would look like?
Now Covid IS killing people, don’t get me wrong. But until we remove sampling bias from our statistics, those statistics aren’t telling us very much.
Currently it appears to me that the NHS is under great strain because of the number of staff off with Covid. That is a legitimate concern. And the more you test, the more staff will be off.
Plus the difficulty in providing care with all the ppe and restrictions.The quality of care in nursing homes, not being able to supplement care by family members, family members not being able to verify quality of care, family members not being able to socialize with dementia patient family members. Some very harsh truths are being ignored at present.
There are two sets of figures in use. The PHE figures, which are more up to date, count deaths in hospital from any cause with a positive test, as you state, and I must say I’m not happy with them being used so cavalierly in public. But the ONS figures are based on death certificates which give Covid as either underlying or contributory cause of death.
I agree.
I just disagree with you in that I believe in parts of the country where Covid has become endemic (i.e. they are getting a wave of second infections with a mutant strain) a large majority of Covid deaths have simply displaced seasonal pneumonia and flu as the underlying cause of death for those dying of old age.
In parts of the country still affected by a second pandemic wave of the first strain, Covid deaths are definitely not simply old age.
My conclusion is that very soon, vaccine or not, we will have to learn to live, and die with Covid, just as we accept Pneumonia
It’s a common misunderstanding that Pneumonia is necessarily an infection. It often is, but essentially it means inflammation in the lungs. The infections that cause pneumonia can be viral, bacterial or fungal. Pneumonia can also arise without infection – as in the case of auto-immune disorders where the body’s own immune system attacks lung tissue with no infection present.
Deaths from non-Covid related Pneumonia have probably decreased because the transmission of non-Covid infections has reduced due to Covid restrictions.
See above. Your argument holds no validity as we have excess deaths.
That is all partly true but I am not sure that’s really the whole picture though, just look at occupancy levels at hospitals around the UK. They are clearly the busiest ever by a huge margin and why is that?
I haven’t been able to find a source of digestible stats (i.e. not in an Excel spreadsheet) for occupancy figures. You can’t post a link, but would you be able to mention where to look?
https://www.england.nhs.uk/…
An updated report is presumably due imminently
Thanks
You can’t post links on here
Put the below into google
NHS statistics urgent-and-emergency-care-daily-situation-reports-2020-21/
Please have a look at the NHS England Sitrep reports online. On 3 January 2020 hospitals were at 83.2 percent occupancy of adult critical care beds (. On 3 January 2021 they were at 80.4 percent, albeit with somewhat greater capacity.
Thanks for the pointer.
See above, he has not provided the full picture.
Looking at the national average is not useful. The same data shows 50 hospitals had a +90% capacity and a few were near 100%. In many hospitals the difference between 90% and 100% is just a few dozen beds. The date of the report is also now 9 days old, in which time daily admissions have grown by 1000 a day.
Oh dear, I read those statistics, compared with the official line and the news, and just got angry. This is a government driven by fear, misunderstanding and panic, not leadership at all.
One immediate cause of the high occupancy levels is the reduction in capacity. My county has 15% fewer beds available than the previous 2 winters, it is utterly amazing that they are not overwhelmed.
Capacity is not reduced, it’s increased. The number of doctors, nurses, ICU beds and general funding is higher than at any point in UK history.
Infection control measures and staff absences have had some impact however.
ICU capacity (though probably not staffing) has increased, but from what I’ve read, overall beds have reduced.
No, they have increased. Do a google search
I checked the figures up to the 3rd January on the excle spreadsheets.
Interestingly, the occupancy is lower than 2018 ( abad year admittedly).
Having seen an item on the news about how alarming Croydon Hospital was, I checked 3rd January this year vs 3rd January 2018.
Oh dear. Croydon was at 100% capacity for the whole of the first week of 2018 but has still some capacity this year.
I’m beginning to see as story here.
Testing shot up prior to Christmas, and as a result, cases shot up. Couple this with the ‘mutant strain’ causing less dangerous second infections, and it seems that the government has misread the statistics and the news have put out alarming stories about high occupancy rates and field morgues with absolutely no context.
The alarmist talk in the news (both ITV and BBC) now seems to be simple moralising propaganda driven by bad reading of statistics. I don’t mind doing my bit to keep infections down this winter, but the more I read the government published facts, rather than the news the angrier I get. Who needs conspiracy theories when the government numbers for the South East clearly contradict their propaganda?
The media love to spread alarm and fear. One of the big problems is the cry wolf and the mispresenting of figures. I expect the lies told by the government in October have made more people sceptical now, where as it does currently appear to be much more serious – based on simple deaths.
As far as the hospitals are concerned, cases and capacity (beds + suitably trained staff) is only half the story.
Unfortunately, if you do get hospitalised with this beastie you are likely to be much sicker and stay in hospital much longer than you would with flu. So … discharges are not keeping up with increasing admissions. Hence the current concerns about the next 3 – 4 weeks or so and your Croydon example – they know, for sure that it is going to get worse for them.
The NHS is under great strain because of the
reduced capacity compared to previous winters. We would be having trouble even if Covid didn’t exist, so how have those running the NHS let this loss of capacity happen? It is less clear to me why capacity is reduced, presumably because fewer people are at work, but again the causes for that are many. Are they all off sick? Or have they decided to quit and care for their children because their vulnerable older family are isolating and can’t do it?
There are indeed a lot off sick, self isolating because they often come into contact with people with COVID. Also the number of beds has been reduced, because social distancing.
Capacity is not reduced, it’s increased. The number of doctors, nurses, ICU beds and general funding is higher than at any point in UK history.
Infection control measures and staff absences have had some impact however.
You can fund as much as you like. If you don’t have the competent staff to run the operation you end up with the NHS who are a bottomless pit. Governments trying to run hospitals fail everywhere.
Medical staff numbers are at a record high.
It’s increased but by nowhere near enough, the extra funding was denied because track and trace was going to save the day.
The government and advisors convinced themselves that their system was working well (ignoring summer etc) and that it was under control.
There seems to have been little official planning or innovation around what could have reasonably been predicted as a very bad winter.
Whilst our vaccine rollout currently seems to be better than most if one looks at Israel you see what happens with actual planning and a desire to get things done.
I believe their health service is also competing non-profit orgs, probably the best solution.
No one in the world predicted a new variant with 50% increase transmissibility. However hospital capacity is still not full and infections are now beginning to fall off, so they clearly had sufficient capacity.
Mutations were predicted as possible. Some people consider that the European Variant was a lot more transmissible/deadly than that seen in China. This may or may not be true. It of course makes sense that the more transmissible variants will spread faster, I think the % is very much up for debate.
Are infection rates actually starting to fall? I’d like to think so, I hope they’re more reaching peak – we won’t know for a while. Only weekly figures average out well.
But even if they peaked today we’re talking about the main hospital surge being in 2 weeks time. And there’s already ~30,000 Covid patients in Hospital now (I’m not sure how many are there for Covid vs aquired Covid in hospital, max 25% I beleive).
I read that, in some hospitals, up to 40% of Covid infections were caught in the hospital by patients in there for other conditions.
Is it 50% increase in the”old” strain now or 50% increase on what the old strain increased at, at its most potent?
I ask this because it appears the new strain has dominated the weakening old strain in several areas. I would expect to be able to run 50%faster than a 75 year old former olympic sprinter NOW but wouldn’t be anywhere near him at his peak if you get my drift
COVID was already relatively infectious with an R rate of between 2 and 3.5. So the new variant has an R rate between 3 and 5. That is considered highly infectious.
I think it’s clear that this government does not do planning and foresight in any consistent manner. But it’s also important to realise that they have been constrained by the reduction in public health capacity due to cuts instituted by previous governments. And a mindset which sees private enterprises as the way to deliver their COVID health solutions. This mindset goes back a long way.
And a mindset which sees private enterprises as the way to deliver their COVID health solutions
What by ignoring the private sectors offers to help and centralising everything, Remember early on when private sector and University labs offered to help with testing and were rebuffed by PHE.
Recently and only through campaigning have Pharmacies been allowed to give the jab.
Private sector isn’t always the solution, and I expect the doomed track and trace is such as example – although it was always doomed.
On the flip side I’ve worked in both public and private sector and some private sector companies that achieve the same Red Tape levels as government, indeed several places were worse.
The government did detailed planning and funding. It’s why our hospitals are coping even now, with the world’s most transmittable variant of the virus producing numbers no one expected.
you are a government spokesperson aren’t you?
You are probably classing the nurses in training who are a hindrance not help at the moment in the figures. Lets be honest here the Government (advisers) have got it wrong on so many fronts and the bilge we are being fed gets ever more comical
No, I am only classing fully trained doctors and nurses FTE in employment.
If you knew how to use google, or where not so paranoid, then you would not of embarrassed yourself by refusing to accept something that anyone can confirm in 2 minutes.
How many EU nurses have left the UK in the last few years? Would be interested to know.
Staffing levels are very low. Capacity is restricted by nurses and doctors. 1.3m foreign nationals have left the UK, taking with them plenty of healthcare workers. The damage done to recruitment by the removal of the nursing bursary and the crisis orientated environment that the NHS has become, prior to Covid.
Your explanation is utterly discredited as we have massive ‘excess deaths’. To suggest it’s a coincidence that the number of excess death roughly equals the number of covid deaths is ludicrous.
and the 7-day average for Covid deaths is still going steadily upwards. Todat is has reached 985. Tomorrow it is likely to exceed 1,000. That’s 365,000 a year, an enormous number. I am sceptical of any suggestion that is is going to fall rapidly, even allowing for the effect of vaccinations. Can we really achieve a 90% reduction in that figure (to bring it below 100) in the space of three months?
One of the few aspects of this pandemic that is universally clear is that it impacts mainly people above 65, particularly medically vulnerable. Every country in the world has the same experience.
Research has shown the vaccine reduces deaths to almost 0. So if the studies are valid, vaccinating everyone above 70 and medically vulnerable will kick in over the next few weeks, peaking 3 weeks after mid Feb (but taking another 3 weeks to show in the stats). So we should seen deaths fall dramatically by the time we get to the end of March, but should be safe to open up in the first week of March if not before. As the vaccine is further rolled out, things will get better and better.
I do however agree deaths will not completely go away, but excess deaths will (the media will ignore the distinction). Hospitalisations will also be a problem for the rest of the year. One third of ICU beds are for people under 60.
So if you argument is that we need to live with a high level of deaths and hospitalisation for sometime, I agree with you. We shall however open the economy regarding by the end of Q1.
“Research has shown the vaccine reduces deaths to almost 0.”
Please indicate where one can find peer reviewed evidence of this from an independent source.
“… No COVID-19-related hospital admissions occurred in ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 recipients
https://www.thelancet.com/j……”
This is based on the data released by Oxford University. The vaccine has only just been tested, so there is limited peer review available. I am afraid that is just the nature of the pandemic. Waiting a few years is not really an option (neither is waiting a few weeks).
However here is some expert opinion that you will not find on twitter:
Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said, “In an ideal world, decisions about treatments would only be made within the exact parameters of the trials which have been conducted. In the real world, this is never so . . . We know that vaccinating only half of a vulnerable population will lead to a notable increase in cases of covid-19, with all that this entails, including deaths. When resources of doses and people to vaccinate are limited, then vaccinating more people with potentially less efficacy is demonstrably better than a fuller efficacy in only half.”
ndrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator into the trial of this vaccine, said that extending the gap between vaccines made biological sense. “Generally, a longer gap between vaccine doses leads to a better immune response, with the second dose causing a better boost. (With HPV vaccine for girls, for example, the gap is a year and gives better responses than a one month gap.) From the Oxford vaccine trials, there is 70% protection after the first dose up to the second dose, and the immune response was about three times greater after the second dose when the second dose was delayed, comparing second dose after four weeks versus second dose after 2-3 months,” he told The BMJ, referring to the MHRA’s summary of product characteristics.11
“With the Pfizer vaccine, there are no published data comparing shorter and longer gaps between doses because all participants had the second dose at 3-4 weeks. However, the biology is straightforward and will be the same as with all vaccines . . . The immune system remembers the first dose and will respond whether the later dose is at three weeks or three months.”
In a statement the British Society for Immunology said, “Most immunologists would agree that delaying a second ‘booster’ dose of a protein antigen vaccine (such as the two approved covid-19 vaccines) by eight weeks would be unlikely to have a negative effect on the overall immune response post-boost. We also would not expect any specific safety issues to arise for the individual due to delaying the second dose, other than an increased potential risk of disease during the extended period due to lowered protection.”
‘Research has shown the vaccine reduces deaths to almost 0.’
The vaccine is only just being ‘rolled out’. There are no statistics for research as yet.
Most of the vaccines have been undergoing placebo controlled trials since the middle or start of last year. During this period tens of thousands of subjects have been vaccinated. Of those who received the vaccines, none died or were made seriously ill due to a COVID infection (after a few weeks post vaccine)
There are two meanings to the term ‘excess deaths’.
One is divergence from the Summer baseline, this is ‘Winter excess deaths’, also known as ‘seasonal deaths’.
The other which is used a lot these days is deaths greater than average for the time of year.
During the first wave, with the original strain, deaths above average for the time of year was larger than the numebr of coronavirus deaths, implying that Covid deaths had been undercounted. Not, I believe controversial.
Currently, in the Midlands and North, which have had a lower total percentage of deaths due to Covid over the year, deaths above average are a little lower than Covid cases, implying that some of the Covid patients would have died of natural causes, many died of Covid pure and simple.
Now look at London and the South East in the ONS excess deaths stats. There, we see no or very, very few deaths above average for the time of year. Why? Why are the Covid deaths we are seeing highly correlated with ‘Winter excess deaths’?
I personally conclude that the second wave in the South East and London looks far worse than it is. I can see how the statistics would terrify, but a 30% uplift in testing over a month is going to create mssive massive counting bias. Winter excess deaths have for time immemorial been caused by pneumonia and flu, but this Winter (2020-21), in London they have been beaten to the jump by Covid.
I expect deaths in London to rise above the average this season (2020-21), but I’d be surprised if the numbers outstrip 2017-18, in fact I predict that Winter excess deaths in the whole country will be only fractionally greater than 2017-18.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent a spread, or vaccinate, given that many NHS staff are off sick, and dealing with very difficult prescriptive practices. But a sense of proportion is vital, given the disruption to education and livelihoods.
If Winter excess deaths this season match 2017-18, then the overreaction due to badly understood statistics simply shows the government to be woeful, and the public innumerate.
I agree with most of what have have said. However ‘winter excess deaths’ is not useful in the context of a year long pandemic. Winter excess deaths is also something of a notional figure. Total excess deaths are much more meaningful. And you will see a very large jump in January for London due to the new variant.
Excess deaths last year are about 15% above the prior five year average. That is the highest increase since the second world war.
It is actually. Quite a lot of deaths didn’t even mention COVID on the death cert despite the government making it a notifiable disease and “mentioned on certificate” being a very lax standard, e.g. “Died of late stage dementia. Had a recent positive test for COVID-19” would be captured by that stat.
The reality is the first lockdown killed a lot of people, it was inevitable. Admissions to hospitals halved nearly overnight. You can’t tell people they have a patriotic, moral duty to stay away from hospitals to “save the NHS” and not have people sacrifice themselves. And that’s before you take into account the huge number of people with delayed surgeries, who will die due to the backlog that was created. The death toll from what happened in April/May will be coming due for years.
The way I see it is that unless you can compare excess deaths with lockdown to excess deaths without lockdown (which for obvious reasons we can’t) you can talk about excess deaths forever and not come to any real conclusion.
You could argue that low excess deaths would indicate the government restrictions (ie lockdowns, masks, social distancing) were a success.
Not that anyone is arguing that, but it’s a valid interpretation.
Oh for a parallel universe to do such comparisons.
Many,many fewer people die of colds.
You are nuts! Until you start using a better test, you have no idea whether a patient truly did die of Covid because false positives influence diagnosis. Lateral flow test in Liverpool found .5% Covid. That’s a good place to start. Diamond Princess showed only about 80% were susceptible. That’s another good place to start. Also, you have to factor in improved outcomes with recent improved treatment. And of course, seasonality factor is huge.
And, since Covid hit, they’ve reduced the number of beds by somewhere between 7 and 10 thousand, to allow more distance between them.
Not off ‘WITH’ covid, but isolating from ‘Exposure, or signs’ of covid.
In my experience, the people I know, it’s off with COVID. Literally sick and in bed with the three classic symptoms and a positive test.
However, isolation from exposure is a furtehr drain on resources, yes.
I will make my own predictions.
It will decline in the summer and come back next winter.
With Covid scare stories and vacination scare stories a regular feature in the media for a decade to come.
Honestly these predictions are laughable, 80% confidence over a massive range. I’m sadly willing to bet that deaths will peak well over the 800 a day. I would also hope that they’ll be well under the 5000.
One of the forecasters honestly gives deaths dropping below 100 a day as anytime from mid Feb to March 2020.
What’s sad is that many of these people playing around with this and silly models are intelligent people, using up resources. They’d be a lot better employed working in areas like vaccine development or some other actually useful field. If they were that great at forecasting they’d make a fortune gambling or in finance.
The facts wouldn’t appear to fit your worldview.
As explained by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, the Imperial/Ferguson model from March was incredibly accurate given the data available at the time:
https://mobile.twitter.com/…
As statisticians say, all models are wrong but some are useful.
He’s talking about Imperial’s IFR estimate whixh went into their model. This was broadly middle ground by guesses back then. However as the replies note if you have to ignore the lowest IFR group < 18s to get 0.9 – otherwise it would be lower. So not actually amazingly accurate at all.
If you have the ability and experience spend 5 minutes looking at the model and it’s code. It’s all you’ll need to see.
If not search for professional reviews of it.
It is a joke, it’s just a hacked buggy mess. It’s written in 60s technology. Half the time it fails over, and there’s huge unintentional randomness when it runs.
The replies from the Imperial team show an incredible arrogance whist demonstrating their complete lack of professional software engineering experience.
Yet the predictions in Imperial’s March report were broadly accurate. See, e.g., page 13:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/…
See page 13. Pretty accurate.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/…
I forecast the 18 Corona Variants will return in Autumn 2021, but over half the population will have ‘herd’ immunity whether they know or not. ”Spanish Flu” 1918-20 ran out of ‘hosts’ plus Isolation hospitals Spelled End of Worst pandemic ever.worse than black death or Plague 1665-66..,,Not Using Nightingale hospitals According to some internet sites have 6-8% capacity is wasteful&Mistake at £225million ..As Orson Welles says in his last directed movie 1974 ”f for fake” Experts are the new oracles &Wrong!!
Absolutely spot on. Those who think they know better have no common sense thus we are in this merry go round which will undoubtedly continue for…………
Astrologers could come up with better results than these experts.
We don’t need predictions at all. People can not be saved by the measures or by the vaccine because the average age of death by Covid-19 was, is en will be 80. The same average age that most people die. That means that the majority of the vulnerable will pretty soon die anyway, the immune-system of an 80 year old with co-morbidity will barely react to whatever vaccine you inject. The only solution to this crisis, for everyone that still has a life ahead of them, is to be disobedient.
The vaccines have been tested in older people too, they do think of these things. The average age thing though important is misused, when you get to 80 you can expect on average to live a lot longer than 2 years for example. Figures of around 7.5 years lost per Covid death have been estimated including their other health conditions, and that’s by people who are sceptical of lockdowns and rightly worried about the huge damage done by lockdown.
One of the point of mass vaccinations too is to induce herd immunity without needing to catch disease. So if for example all 80+ years olds aquired no immunity from the vaccine – they would still be protected by not being exposed to the virus in 1st place, because herd immunity stops outbreaks with no effort.
The biggest issue to me remains why we didn’t protect those who we knew were vulnerable and let other people make sensible judgements (I’d have stopped large events and encourage home working as min). Yes this would have been an expensive and challenging thing to do, but compared to the huge damage of lockdown and it’s ineffectiveness it would seem sensible.
The problem with your ‘mass vaccinations’ is that none of the current crop of ‘vaccines’ are actually vaccines at all. The definition of a vaccine;
” a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease.”
doesn’t apply to any of the current vaccines.
From a paper published in 2017 (my emphasis)
does it matter what it is called if it does the job?
‘from the Latin vaccinia, associated with the adjective vaccinus, understanding anything related to cows’ The original vaccine was Cowpox, this was niether derived from Smallpox nor synthetic.
So the original vaccine doesn’t qualify as a vaccine.
There’s various names for different types of vaccines, the smallpox one falls into the category of Heterotypic apparently, where a non harmful virus from another species is used to give a good immune response.
And yes I merely googled this and whilst I’ve heard of Jenner and the origin of the name vaccine, I wouldn’t pretend to understand the various complexities within this field.
The Oxford vaccine is a vaccine in the traditional sense.
Luke, unfortunately this is not the case. Check out Sebastian Rushworth MD. A medic from Sweden. Find him on DuckDuckGo. Don’t use google or Mozilla people. Heavily censored searches on them.
So Simon investigated all 3 vaccines based on published info on the trials and results.
You can see his work for yourself.
2 of the 3 vaccines were not tested on anyone over 65, or anyone with BMI over 25.
Pages and pages of analysis with conclusions.
Regarding having the vaccines himself, he states he definitely would NOT have 2 of them , Pziser and Astra, he explains why. If necessary he personally as a healthy young medic would be prepared to have the Moderna vaccine.
Please note, I am not recommending the Moderna vaccine here. I personally and my family and as Power of Attourney for my Mother in Law, none of us will be going anywhere near these vaccines.
Thanks for that reference to Rushworth John. That is the information I think needs to be communicated. The real safety and efficacy of the current vaccines.
When I looked up the I found a lot of reference to over 65’s, for example from New Scienctist regarding pfizer:
Does it work on over 65s
Yes. Trial participants were aged up to 85, and the efficacy in people
over 65 was 94 per cent ““ a tiny bit lower than the overall number but
still very protective, and much higher than some vaccine experts feared.
The vaccine hasn’t been tested in people aged over 85.
This sort of thing is repeated everywhere. Yes there’s some BS out there and google/youtube have acted like censors, but I’m fairly confident in the vaccines. They’ve got through standard trials, with regulation and real scientists. The difference between the science of vaccines and the lockdowns is huge, if lockdowns were on a trial they’d have been abandoned very early on as being very inefficent with massive side effects.
I wouldn’t rely on any information from Sebastian Rushworth. He graduated from med school in 2020. He is not yet a fully fledged doctor in his hospital. His articles are largely anecdotal and he clearly attempts to promote himself amongst right wing or libertarian websites by posting anti-lockdown propaganda. He’s a charlatan.
But the vast majority of relatively healthy 80+ will also survive, without measures, without hospitalisation and without a vaccine. The majority of covid-death dies because they were already severely ill (diabetes, obese, cardiac problems, etc.,). Covid is almost always the last push, nothing less, nothing more. Most of the things that governments and virologist have invented past year mostly just stretches the proces of dying and, of course very important, brings down hospitalisations a little bit. Meanwhile it seems to me that the ‘collateral’ damage is not so collateral anymore….
Excess deaths show it well, in April 2020 it’s a massive spike with a further 20,000+ not accounted for by Covid. Your list of severly ill is a bit strange: diabetes, obese? Both often linked and not usually defined as severly ill. I except heart problems, cancer etc.
The excess figures for Jan this year and I expect Feb will be very high.
Look I’m sceptical of many of the measures (and the authoritarian zeal) and I think the government messenging around Covid has been a disaster. Basically:
Protect the NHS, Stay at Home, Die alone.
There should from day 1 have been a clear message to vulnerable groups to explain that they are upto 10000 times more likely to die from Covid than younger/healthier people. Supermarket deliveries should have been reserved for this group with volunteer support (of which there was a huge underused number). Anything to protect these people. Instead healthy 20 year olds stayed at home, whilst unhealthy 65 year olds went out to work.
The rest of us could have treated this like a ‘bad flu’ (in common terms) something no one goes out of their way to catch, but not usually fatal. Apart from being far less damaging this may have saved a lot of lives.
And whilst Covid can in theory kill anyone – so can anything. Far more healthy under 60s die in car accidents than with Covid.
I am 70 years old and I run half marathons. I agree in one way with you that old (and young) people do not keep themselves fit for life. But when I speak to other people who are of a similar age they would fight tooth and nail for an extra 10 years, whatever the cost to the NHS. One day you will be in the same position. If you are lonely and lack close family you may still say the same thing in the future. But if you have grandchildren and you want to see them grow up, you will change your mind.
With 7.5 years lost per COVID death, think about how many deaths would need to be avoided by the lockdown in order for the cost per life year saved to be reduced to the typical threshold for health interventions of $50,000/life year.
There’s good work by a Risk Management Professor, I think Phillip Thomas. He estimates at 7.5 years lost from 250,000 deaths that the life years lost are still well below the 1/3 year life exptency lost by all 67 million of us due to lockdown economic damage. Indeed by a factor of 10.
But that isn’t the right comparison. It is not that the lockdown is causing everyone a loss in life expectancy, it is that the money we are spending/forgoing through the lockdown is not now available for other health interventions that potentially could save more life years at less cost. We are trading off other people’s lives in an attempt to save lives now. We just don’t see that. It is why we have thresholds of cost per life year saved so that we can compare interventions on their overall benefit. Take the amount of deficit racked up to fight COVID and imagine how many life years could be saved if that type of money was thrown at, say the eradication of tuberculosis or malaria.
I am sorry, I completely misread your comment! Still stand by what I wrote but it re-enforces what you shared rather than contradicting it!
Correct, the average age of death with covid present on the death certificate is 82. Life expectancy in the UK is 81.16 years!
Life expectancy at birth is 81 years (higher for women and lower for men). Life expectancy at 81 years is a further 10 years on average (ONS). This drops significantly with ill health.
This is common statistical misunderstanding (repeated ad nauseam all over the internet). People who are 80 are not ‘due to die anyway’. They live on average another 10 years according to the research. The referenced average life expectancy is for the entire population, not people who are 80.
JJ, the reason it’s repeated ad nauseam is because it’s correct!
In the ONS report “National life tables ““ life expectancy in the UK: 2017 to 2019” from September 2020 we can clearly see the following:
I think you’re getting confused with the fact that IF someone reaches the age of 80 then they might expect to live another 10 years on average. Of course many don’t (reach 80) and you can argue that they may have reached 80, 81, 82 etc against all odds.
So, just because you’ve hit 80 and then succumb to Covid it didn’t mean that you were going to live another 8-10 years. I’m afraid that statistically speaking those that die of Covid are around (or slightly older) than the normal average age of death.
I think we all need to take some care to get facts right and not twist data to suit our narrative… the government have got that covered!
Sorry, but if all the 80+ year old people die, the average age of death with be less than 80. A mathematical certainty: the average of numbers less than 80 is less than 80.
Here’s my prediction.
When the deaths from the season effect go, the government will claim a massive success of its lock down, and its vaccination program of people who already have immunity.
My second prediction. In the UK there are guidelines as to when to spend and when to not spend on heath treatment. It’s £30,000 a year of quality life.
Have they done the cost assessment of the lock down? of course not.
If you do a back of envelope it’s at least a million per person. However the problem is, we don’t know the baseline. If the government took no action, or less action, how much better would the economy be? There would still be massive falls in GDP and the government would still need to spend money to those impact. We also don’t know how many additional people would die if we had not took action.
But the point is they at least need to make an attempt at this sort of economic analysis. And it appears that they simply are not. And as for not knowing how many additional people would die if “we had not took action” – there are studies which show that lockdown measures make no difference to overall mortality. I can’t post a link of course but do a search for a Lancet study by Chaudry and others “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions ….”
They have attempted to look at social and economic costs. But it’s almost impossible. Thanks for the Lancet reference, it was an interesting study. But it only had data upto June, so lacks validity. They also had limited data available back then too.
“The cost of the cure” was published in December by civitas.org.uk
That paper agrees with post. To quote them:
“Inevitably, many of our estimates rely on certain counterfactual assumptions which are by their nature unprovable. In all cases, the assumptions and estimates have been set out; and in all cases these assumptions and estimates have been cautious.”
The other contentious and unprovable estimate is the ‘benefits’. That is, how many people have been saved from illness, hospitalization and death. And what would the additional financial cost be if we had not saved them ‘in terms of additional hospital capacity required and public fear about mass infections’
So we are back to square one. You do not advance the debate by pretending any of this is simple or easy.
I think it’s pretty clear using QALY that the government has spent well in excess of what would normally be spent. Even allowing for Ferguson’s hideous calculation it was still excess. I don’t need to go any further.
You really need to go further and read more. You are suffering from confirmation bias. You ignore any research which contradicts your pre-judged position and jump on any research that confirms it.
Ferguson was wrong, he underestimated how many deaths we would suffer. The 500K figure was never a projection, if you had read the report or listened to any of his interviews you would know that.
The 80% confidence limits in this exercise are so broad that the actual predictions look rather silly. That’s what dart boards are made for.
Agreed.
Yes, but at least they are honest. Most forecasters are absolutely certain.
for goodness sake! what a waste of time and effort. this is all based on accepting that PCR testing is accurate. No data can be relied on. Whilst we are still supporting this flawed measure of the disease in our population we will never be free of the restrictions. It is endemic. Yes vaccinate the elderly and the vulnerable, but stop mass testing. It is feeding the hysteria. Only pillar 1 testing, with clinical diagnosis should be accepted as a positive test. We need honest reporting on underlying reasons for death where covid is also mentioned. we need to know the demographics of those that are dying, on a daily basis. with this information we can begin to understand how these people are getting infected. not only that but the message of who is getting sick and dying can begin to be disseminated so that the population can get some sort of perspective. Context needs to be given, we need to know how many people are discharged, daily, from hospital, how many recovered people are in hospital, but are bed blocking because there is nowhere for them to be discharged to. and, most importantly, people should be encouraged to get the virus. I have had it (ok.. i am relying on pillar 2 testing to say that) and so has my husband, my adult daughter and her boyfriend. All sorts of mixed symptoms, none of them serious or debilitating. Getting this disease is not a death sentence for the vast majority of the population. We have to get context, balance and all the information out there, and quickly. Every day this pantomime continues we are plunging thousands more into poverty. It is so utterly selfish and short sighted. It makes me ashamed to be a human being. This is being driven by nothing other than greed. It is truly disgusting.
Maybe this would be helpful in terms of some of the stats you were looking for? I found it helpful.
https://www.worldometers.in…
PCR is irrelevant in this context. They were talking about deaths and hospital admissions. You don’t have false positive excess deaths or excess hospital admissions.
“However, with 160,000 infections a day currently in the UK and a fatality rate just below 1%, 1,400 deaths a day seems likely.” It seems this prediction uses the results of PCR tests rather than clinical diagnoses.
If you only used clinical diagnosis, it would be the CFR and not the IFR.
Remember, most people getting diagnosed with PCR have symptoms, that’s what they are having the test . PCR is no prefect, but it’s the best we have have for now.
“Most people getting diagnosed with PCR have symptoms”
No they don’t. The cycle threshold used in PCR is excessive and pointless only insofar as to drive up cases, which suits the narrative.
As posted previously I believe you are a government spokesperson
The cycle threshold used in PCR actually varies by country and in some cases even by manufacturer. Some set it too high, others too low. Currently false negatives are a far bigger issue in PCR than false positives.
ONS estimate false positives as being less than 1%
“As posted previously I believe you are a government spokesperson” Are you really that far down the rabbit hole? You are now seeing spies around every corner? For your own sake, you need to take a rest from social media and reflect on your own life. You are not going to find the promised land on twitter or youtube.
The ONS has no idea what the FP rate is by their own admission. And it’s factually the case that most people don’t have symptoms because the positivity rate is very low – most people getting tested don’t test positive at all. Positivity rate in the UK is currently 10% and declining. Given how hyper-sensitive these tests are, for 90% to test negative means far more than 90% are symptomless … even given the very broad set of COVID symptoms.
You overlook the infection surveys (ONS and REACT) which both use a fixed random sample of tests. Asymptomatic cases average is about 30%.
Positivity rates are currently about 10% and falling, due to the lockdown. They did however increase from a rate of 0.8% in summer to a peak of 12% a few weeks ago. Positivity rates correlate quite well with lockdowns (falling during and increasing before and afterwards).
If positivity rates can be as low as 0.8%, you cannot have a false positive rate which is higher than this.
Incidentally, the UK tests more than any other major country, which is why our infection rate often looks worse than other countries, but often may not be.
Disappointingly broad conclusions. Seems Superforecasters are little better than the man on the Clapham omnibus.
Worse in fact, but better paid.
In the recent Frontiers in Medicine study, one of the very few, for obvious reasons, large scale ‘meta’ studies looking into the varying impacts of covid on the various countries across the globe and their possible reasons points to a response, particularly in the Western more advanced economies with increasing aging populations but with fast slowing or now declining life expectancies and increasingly prevalent chronic health problems where the ravages of covid seem far more apparent, akin to King Canute on the beach.
Ironically, King Canute, of course, famously performed this piece of political theatre precisely in order to finally prove to his trusting wide-eyed subjects the limitations of his power, unlike our current woeful crop of political masters who seem to have seen it as a unique opportunity to demonstrate the extent of it in the face of what future (and current) evidence suggests was all but inevitable and beyond their control.
That’s true – it is worrying that our current crop of leaders have less wisdom than an 11th century Danish king.
Thank god we have Trump. The wisest of wise men.
The whole house of cards is unsafe. The experts have been brainwashed to varying degrees. The very existence of the virus is questionable. The testing is one of the most unreliable ever offered up. There is no scientific basis for any aspect e.g. masks, lock downs etc The Government are hopelessly compromised with conflict of interest. How can there be any objective ‘forecast’.
True
So you’re saying there is perhaps no Covid 19 in circulation at all?
Perhaps you are the one who is brainwashed?
To conclude that anyone with professional expertise, experience and training is ‘brainwashed’ and only people with no training, expertise or experience are correct, is problematic to say the least. Perhaps its also a little stupid.
I think what Brian Snellgrove is trying to say is that any scientists that voice support for the severe lockdown measures are labelled ‘experts’ by the mainstream media. Those scientists that disagree with the current measures being put in place are ignored by the media. Personally, I would take rather take my chances with the virus and live life as normally as possible than be cooped up in my house all day. I’m also cautious of a vaccine that has not been longitudinally tested. The crazy thing is while people wear masks and isolate themselves in their homes, I’m the one who is often accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
The forecasting that interests me is how many people are going to suffer such serious mental trauma and collapse that they cease to function effectively. Losing your business. Losing your ability to feed and house your family. Children denied the company of their friends. The old and lonely in despair and just wasting away or simply no longer motivated to live.,
Do not tell me this is an exaggeration as I see it all around me. People I always thought strong just in despair.
All along we have concentrated on the ‘science’ whatever that means and neglected the human.
No society can function on that basis. It has now gone so deep that it will scar us for years.
This government has never understood this at all. Even now it continues to increase the fear level and the apprehension of what it will do next. Make masks compulsory the moment you leave home? Three metres distancing. More businesses shut down. No normal life unless you have a vaccine passport. It is like living with an abuser.
What I can forecast is that this is one of those key events in our history and like all such the true effects will take around three years to surface. Also that those who lead us out of it are not visible at the moment. They are not those in power or having influence now. This is my prediction and I stand by it.
Roughest of rides ahead.
If only we lived in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, or Taiwan, and we wouldn’t have to be worrying about any of this. But sadly neither our governments, nor enough of our citizens, have the qualities necessary
Never blame the people. A leader is a person who accepts responsibility.
I saw the way Queensland acted and honestly no thank you.
Well said, bloodshed beckons on a scale not seen since the fall of the Roman Republic.
“Sine missione”, as we used cry on those great days in the Amphitheater.
Basically this seems a range of predictions from good to bad with a lot of hedging.
I don’t see how that qualifies as superforecasting.
How do excess deaths today compare to excess deaths in the spring? They are using mass pcr testing to coverup the increase in herd immunity.
From ONS :
In Week 50 of 2020, (the most complete provisional figures they have) the number of deaths registered was 14.3% above the five-year average (1,542 deaths higher).
This compares with the peak on the ONS graph around 10 April, of about 11,000 excess deaths above the 5 year average.
Week of April 17 deaths were over 20,000 with expected deaths of 10,000. Now we have excess deaths of about 2000 over instead of 10,000 over. How many of these excess deaths today are form the exceptionally poor care being provided by the NHS? It is criminal who they handling treatments and patients…… from the ONS “The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales decreased from 11,520 in Week 52 (week ending 25 December 2020) to 10,069 in Week 53 (week ending 1 January 2021). The number of deaths was 26.6% above the five-year average (2,115 deaths higher).”
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peop…
I have no view on when or if Covid will disappear, of how many will be vaccinated by a certain date. But I will say that one of the (many) reasons I gave up on the MSM – certainly in terms of funding it in any way – was the the way in which its predictions were always hopelessly inaccurate.
Then you should also give up on social media. Often projections there are not just wrong, they are ludicrous.
I do worry that the data on Covid deaths is not going to change much after vaccination roll out. I base that on the now well known facts that the average Covid victim is 83 or so and has two or more underlying health conditions. The actuarial data on such a person is that they will, on the average, be dead in six months even without Covid. Since it seems to be the case that the vaccine won’t stop Covid being present in someone’s system (and in any event a PCR test will pick up Covid in someone’s body even if the virus has been dead for months) it is inevitable that a) large number of people in the vulnerable group will still die, and b) when they do many of them will test positive for Covid and will thus be counted as Covid deaths.
I hope I am wrong but I reckon if the data points we currently focus on remain ‘sacrosanct’ then there is going to be plenty of justification in that data for anyone that thinks lockdowns should be retained.
Your issue is easily addressed by the excess death figures. If your concern is correct, there will be no excess deaths. We monitor these in detail each week and so far they have been remarkably consistent with COVID deaths (they are about 10% less, suggesting there is some overdiagnosing, but not that much)
Maybe. But is that excess deaths to last year? To a five year average? To a 20 year average? To age adjusted mortality expectations? To a prior month? To a prior ‘flu season’ of several months duration? Everytime I see a reference to excess deaths I know there is selectivity in the measure and that use of a different comparator would produce a different answer. For instance, JJ, you quote excess deaths since October to (I think) a five year average at a few points in this thread. Does it matter that deaths over that period were higher than today in two of the five years? Maybe not – but maybe there is such a thing as excess deaths well within the normal range.
Every base measure you suggested indicates increased deaths in 2020. The last time we had similar age adjusted mortality was in 2008, so we have wiped out 12 years of reducing mortality.
Btw, I am not suggesting lockdown was worth it. I suspect it wasn’t. But I refuse to pretend COVID is not killing people and would of killed a lot more people if we had not taken action. I am afraid the options are shit and shitter.
ONS will answer most of your questions with nice graphs showing average and range over last 5 years (if you go back any further than that you have to start taking account of total population number changes – as ONS explains) :
“Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional : …”
or EUROMOMO if you want to see figures going back further, on one graph.
Full excess death stats won’t be complete for 2020 until end of February I would think, given reporting delays with coroners courts delaying death certification.
Public Enquiry,will Find ”No” Guilty men/Women it’ll say Government ministers did their best ..But Logistics alone have been A cockup….vallance,Whitty,Ferguson have destroyed A lot of ”Scientific” belief ..Data has been skewered to suit A Lockdown…
As I have said elsewhere on the post, if you are lonely and single and young your view is correct. If you are 80 years old and you want to see your grandchildren grow for a few years, you have a different viewpoint. I suppose that all viewpoints are allowed.
But if you are correct it means that older people who have heart attacks should not be treated and the same with cancer sufferers. The NHS would make so much money that it would go into profit.
I looked hopefully at the title, with added hope because it was on unherd.
Unfortunately, without some clue about the thinking behind the bars, the numbers are not very informative. The things being predicted are too vague and multifactorial, much more so than the weight of Galtons ox. Scenarios, with associated narratives and comments, would have been very interesting. Perhaps you can try to get them?
One clear observation: the high outliers have relatively massive error bars.
It will end when politicians have drained all the utility they can from various steps that have had no effect beyond harming the lives of citizens who are treated more like subjects. There remains an insistence on treating this virus with an outsized sense of panic and it’s gone on long enough that the panic has been instilled among laypeople.
“Cases” is somehow translated into “deaths,” despite no evidence of such. A higher caseload of a respiratory virus during colder months has been occurring since the dawn of respiratory viruses. Except for the flu, apparently, which has miraculously disappeared from the US.
It’s hard to start with how much misinformation us embedded in your short post. Even your cult messiah Trump was aware of the significant dangers of this virus nearly 12 months ago. Unsurprisingly, he lied about it.
Covid is nothing like flu or any of the other recent common winter respiratory virus as a quick perusal of Figure 18 “Number of admissions with pneumonia (not COVID-19) by month,
2016-2020 , compared with confirmed COVID-19 during 2020″ in the ICNARC report will show : “ICNARC report on COVID-19 in critical care:
England, Wales and Northern Ireland
8 January 2021″ It is an endothelial, thrombotic, multi-system disease which is why it is so rapacious of NHS resources.
+ the VA study from the US :
“Notably, compared with patients with influenza, patients with COVID-19 had two times the risk for pneumonia, 1.7 times the risk for respiratory failure, 19 times the risk for ARDS, and 3.5 times the risk for pneumothorax, underscoring the severity of COVID-19 respiratory illness relative to that of influenza.”
Cases and deaths. Yes the mortality rate in hospitalised Covid patients improved from March – August as one would expect as clinicians got to grip with the management of the disease and the demography of the people admitted, changed. However, if you don’t catch Covid then you won’t die from it’s effects.
ONS have got provisional death data up to week 49 for 2020. 34 of those weeks show non Covid deaths less than the 5 year average so I see no epidemic of non Covid deaths as predicted by some people.
The reasons there has been so little flu this year both in the Southern hemisphere and now in the North are pretty obvious I think :
1. A larger than average take up of flu vaccinations
2. Islolating, quarantine, masks, physical distancing and washing your hands works particularly well against flu as well as mitigating Covid.
3. The Southern hemsiphere managed Covid particularly well this year with their NPIs – which suppressed flu transmission as well. In part, the South seeds the North with their viruses as the northern autumn and winter come on, via travel (much curtailed this year). Anyone travelling North was carrying little or no flu with them.
When you ask the wrong question you’re likely to get the wrong answer. It’s not the number of Covid deaths but the total number of excess deaths that are the key measure. There was a massive spike in excess deaths in April, reflecting the first Covid wave. Excess deaths in late 2020 were a significant increase over average but less than the numbers in early 2018. Deaths from flu and pneumonia have been low as Covid deaths have increased, whilst the average age of death has remained over 80; this suggests that many people dying in the last few months would have died if Covid did not exist from other causes. So deaths will go down from late March and there may be a small increase in excess death next winter as a result of a small number of people being vulnerable.
Correct. And in the UK at least, there have been very few weeks since May with statistically significant excess deaths (and one of those was the week it was 37 degrees across southern England). Which suggest COVID overdiagnosis.
That is just plain wrong. FFS, go to the ONS site. We have had almost constance excess deaths since October. I don’t understand people like you who write with such confidence, without having a clue
Google
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending 1 January 2021
You are not using the latest data. Excess deaths are now significantly above the 5 year average and 2018 from about October to December and will no doubt continue in Q1 this year. It’s all available from ONS
I was using the ONS data.
Then you don’t understand them. Total excess deaths for the year are substantially above the five year average – about 15% above. This is the highest percentage increase since the second world war.
I understand them perfectly as explained in my original post. Most of the excess death were during the Spring wave of the disease. The excess deaths have been at a lower level in the winter though above average – but still lower than the excess deaths in early 2018.
You are referring to winter excess deaths, not excess deaths. The former is a notional figure. You need to focus on total excess deaths. For the months Oct to December they are higher than the five year average.
Yes, but they do not exceed the five year average by as much as in early 2018.
I wish the emphasis was in “excess deaths” over the whole season instead of this very arbitrary and easy to manipulate concept of “covid” deaths.
If in 2017 you had tested for influenza like we do for covid, and assign influenza deaths to anyone who died after 28 days of testing positive the numbers would be quite comparable, with nowadays.
This winter’s excess deaths are by no means re-markable when compared with previous winters.
I just wonder how many people have died within 28 days of getting the vaccine, though.
You can’t just look at winter excess deaths, the pandemic has been around outside of Winter.
Total 2020 excess deaths are the highest on record (compared to prior five years). Total deaths are the highest since 1985. Mortality rates are the highest since 2008
Can you please cite references or point to sources for these numbers?
You can’t post links on this site. However all of the data I referenced is on the ONS site. Excess death data is published weekly, there is no excuse for people not understanding these figures (it was clear in the first few months of the pandemic, it’s not now).
Google:
ONS Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending 1 January 2021
ONS Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales: November 2020
Oh, I remember the 2008 lockdowns. Devastating they were.
You make only half a point.
It’s true the risk of dying now is the same as 2008, in the aggregate. And as you imply, I don’t recall anyone being too upset or scared back then.
However you need to remember mortality improves every year (since the birth of capitalism) outside of wars and natural disasters. If there was a terrorist attack and they killed 80K people, would you respond ‘so what, just as many people died in 2008’? Of course not, so why do that in relation to COVID?
If your general point is that we just need to take this pandemic on the chin and not close down the economy, I largely agree with you.
Given some of the stories I’m hearing from around the world about people dropping dead after taking the vaccine, it may be the case that the vaccine kills more healthy young people than than the virus does.
We all hear lots of stories, some of them may even be true. The names of five of those people who dropped dead after taking the vaccine, please.
To be fair, vaccinating 80 year olds is going to have that effect. With only a 10 year life expectancy, the chance of an 80+ year old dying in any given week is pretty high, about 0.2% by a back of fag packet calculation . If the government has vaccinated 500000, then roughly 1000 of them will have died this week , 1000 more of them will die next week, and so on
I disagree. This winter’s weekly deaths, since mid-October, have been 10% (about 1,000/week) higher than the worst of the past ten years. I find that remarkable.
Keeping score, accountability, truth………Ahh remember those days…………
However, with 160,000 infections a day currently in the UK and a fatality rate just below 1%, 1,400 deaths a day seems likely.
=======
Where the estimate for the 1% come from?
That’s the problem. You have two variables and one dodgy statistic, the death from covid number
Exactly….Don’t get me started…1%? Not even close …..
You should write to the Lancet, the BMJ, Imperial College as they are being denied your gifted expertise.
There are now multiple peer reviewed research papers suggesting that figure is in the right ballpark, for the UK. We have had about 80K covid deaths about about 16% of the population infected (that is a very liberal estimate and most studies put the figure at a much lower number).
The figure is much lower in developing countries due to different demographics and higher Vit D levels.
One of the most frustrating things about the reporting during this pandemic for me has been the over use of the word ‘expert’, this is especially in relation to the world of science.
I have always looked upon an ‘expert’ as someone who has a proven background of working in the field of their supposed expertise. However during the pandemic individuals are wheeled out to give an opinion and when you look into their background they are academically qualified to offer an opinion but have no direct hands-on experience in actually dealing with the subject matter which in my view makes them knowledgeable but not necessarily expert.
The various forms of media wheel out any given ‘expert’ who will offer an opposing opinion to that given by for example the government or SAGE which may be useful in determining effectiveness of actions but to call them an expert because they sit behind a desk reading up and theorising about a specific topic without any hands on experience in actually dealing with the subject or similar. All they are giving is their opinion, not expert opinion as we all know opinions are like noses most people have one.
What makes Sage experts on viruses? Behavioral psychology maybe… the government too for that matter.
SAGE is full of medical virologists and infectious disease experts. Do you really believe its not?
Actually, sadly, SAGE is not full of virologists and infectious disease experts as was noted by The Guardian last April (easy to google the article)…to quote: they learned from the list of attendees at a crucial Sage meeting on 23
March, that the group includes 7 clinical
academics, 3 microbiologists, 7 modellers, 2 behavioural
scientists with backgrounds in disasters and terrorism, one geneticist,
one civil servant and 2 political advisers, one of which is the most
powerful prime ministerial lieutenant in recent memory. End quote.
SAGE lists 86 participants (not counting the associated groups like NERVTAG – which has 17 participants).
The participants are who you would expect – immunologists, microbiologists, epidemiologists, critical care, public health bods, renal physician, CMOs, and including yes … a respiratory virus specialist
The minutes of their meetings including who attended (apart from the minion civil servants) are all viewable online
I think once the medical establishment began to entertain the notion that men can be women, trust for them among the electorate was lost.
I believe SAGE is corrupt. I am well aware that a big part of SAGE is behavioral psychology. They don’t hide that fact. https://assets.publishing.s…
‘I believe’ is not an argument. It’s a cross functional team. It has virologists, immunologists, hospital consultants and economists among others.
What exactly do you have against behaviour psychologists?
Totally agree. Not that it has made any difference to his God-like importance but it was entertaining to see Professor Ferguson squirm when asked if he had any medical training – he doesn’t, not even a Biology O level. Maybe that doesn’t matter as he is a data modeller, but maybe it does – I know lockdown sceptics have been harangued for not accurately forecasting a winter resurgence, but you could equally harangue the Ferguson / Imperial forecasts as they excluded any seasonal factors or variation. Dear Sage, if your expert is better than my expert, should he really have got that point so wrong?
It absolutely does, because it explains why the parameters he selected for insertion into his faulty model were themselves so ridiculous. Even if you believe the technical modelling was vaguely acceptable, if you make ludicrous assumptions (and I understand that he basically tore up the entire immunology and virology text book) about susceptibility then you end up with a ludicrous answer.
” … and I understand that he basically tore up the entire immunology and virology text book) about susceptibility …” – I guess you are referring to Gabrielle Gomes’s (a mathematician) competing Herd Immunity Threshold model. This has a scenario where lots of younger people in a population get Covid and have a robust immune response which lasts for at least a year thus achieving herd immunity at a relatively lower level – as low as 10%.
With the level of infection in the spring, free movement in the summer and plenty of transmission in the early autumn when schools and universities were open, it would appear that Dr Gome’s threshold has yet to be reached otherwise we wouldn’t have hospitals as busy as they are right now.
Ferguson is an expert epidemiologist in infectious disease and Phd mathematician with several decades experience in modeling pandemics. If that is not an expert, what is. Your local GP?
Chris Witty and Valance are both medical doctors. I doubt you consider them experts either.
Is that the ‘my experts are better than your experts’ argument? Professor Ferguson is a mathematician with a PhD in theoretical physics. I think we both agree. Just to take on example though Professor Gupta is a biologist with a PhD in the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases and whose laboratory was one of the first in the world to isolate the genome of Covid 19. Based on a simple review of credentials one would have to say Professor Gupta has a great deal more relevant expertise than Professor Ferguson, just like Professor Ferguson has more relevant expertise than my GP. Like all of these ‘listen to the experts’ arguments is it really the case that we have considered which experts are best qualified, or indeed most likely (based on their past performance) to be right? Or is it that we just homed in on the experts who were saying what we believed?
Science does not work like that. It works on peer review and publication. There is never a consensus. You can’t just say I have found one scientist who disagrees with everyone else but I believe they are right. The fact is Ferguson’s projections have been peer reviewed and published. Gupta has few if any such publications.
Furthermore Gupta’s projections have all been wrong. Ferguson has been in the right ball park.
Sorry, this one isn’t up for debate – the model Ferguson uses to inform projections he supplies to the government has not been peer reviewed. He has not made it available to other scientists and has never disclosed his modelling assumptions. The criticisms of his model that make it into print are based on leaks (such as the suggestion that he assumed the same death rate in all age groups) or on the way reports submitted to Sage have been formatted (such as there being no seasonality in his projections). Most of what we know about the mechanics of his model has had to be drawn from leaked software code. He may be right (there would be a first time for everything) but to suggest he is the epitome of peer reviewed science on Covid is clearly rubbish.
Ferguson’s Report 9 (freely available to view) states that they adapted their original influenza model that is published in excrutiating detail in Nature in 2006.
They detail in Report 9 the assumptions they used for their Covid model. They did NOT assume the same IFR for all age groups (see Table 1)
They used their original influenza model as the basis for their Covid scenarios because they didn’t have enough time to build a new model from scratch and anyway the only data they had at that point was what they knew from China.
The concerns about the code underpinning the modelling were addressed back in the spring when it was checked and run independently by a French computational biophysicist and was then cleaned up by RAMP in association with the Royal Society and teh IMperial team and then posted on GitHub for everyone to see.
Details of all this here :
“Critiqued Coronoavirus simulation gets thumbs up from code- checking efforts” Nature News June 8
You are Nuts!,Ferguson track record with CJD,Zika,SARS1, HS1N!, &SARS2 has been hopelessly wrong..97% of reported covid SARS2 deaths are with undiagnosed or Underlying Conditions, the Real Tsunami of Deaths will be Cancer,Heart,lung ,Blood Patients die before they can be treated or GP reopen..
It’s not even debatable! Anyone else with such a dire history of massive error would have been sent packing with his/her P45 ages ago….yet here he is all over the media again.
You defy belief. Ferguson has been consistently wrong on everything he has touched. Your credulity in so-called experts like him shows no appreciation of track record or context. There are experts with excellent qualifications and track records who are being ignored or rubbished by people like you who have a singular, dogmatic point of view and a high sense of personal rectitude which borders on the tedious. It’s also noted that you crank up the level of insults or patronising comment when you can’t secure agreement with your own point of view.
Are you more qualified than the scientists who have a different view from the one being slavishly followed, the lack of success of which is increasingly apparent. Thought not.
Why not show some respect for other viewpoints?
You probably didn’t even know who Ferguson was or have any understanding of epidemiology until you read some badly researched ‘outrage’ piece on the internet. Then you decide that this one man is to blame for anything that has ever gone wrong in the world and must be ‘brought to justice’.
If you think that is how science works, it’s going to be difficult to convince you otherwise. You suffer from something called ‘confirmation bias’. You seem so far down the rabbit hole it’s unlikely anyone is going convince you.
However if you are open to genuinely being convinced that you are wrong about Ferguson, I am happy to debate you of the facts (not on your deranged personal hatred for man who you’ve never met or whose work you have never read)
I rest my case. Ferguson has been around for a long time – as have I – and it appears I am far from the only person with an ability to put his abject shortcomings into perspective. Not the case for you it seems. How many past failures on his part does it take for you to overcome your very own deranged personal adulation of this utterly reckless charlatan?
And by the way, can you demonstrate that his “work” has been peer-reviewed or that he has shared his underlying assumptions? You’re going to struggle.
What entitles you to pronounce on how science works? What is your background, exactly? At the most basic level, science is about weighing empirical evidence and being open to all points of perspective but ultimately judging on the data and evidence available. You clearly have zero scientific background but have the abject cheek to suggest that I and others who follow a similarly sceptical approach are guilty of confirmation bias. You are so blind to other opinions or proper review of the data that a perverse sense of irony must be your only refuge.
You’ve suggested others take a rest. You’d do very well to heed your own counsel. In fact if you’re so unwilling to countenance debate or brook no opposition to your one-eyed views, I’d suggest you’re on the wrong forum.
Do you work for the government?
All of the claims about Ferguson that you have copied off Twitter have been debunked. The best summary is from the fact checking service below (you will need to google to get the full article).
As for Ferguson not being published, what a stupid thing to say. Do you even know how you become a Professor at a University?
A widely-shared claim on social media in Scotland and across the UK suggested that Professor Ferguson’s predictions about the number of deaths from Covid-19 were inaccurate, and he had vastly overestimated deaths from previous public health scares such as bird flu, BSE and foot and mouth disease. Similar claims also appeared in The Spectator and National Review.
Ferret Fact Service verdict: False
The image shared features a number of inaccuracies about Professor Neil Ferguson’s record. It incorrectly states he predicted 500,000 deaths from coronavirus, when in fact this was a projection if no action had been taken by the government to suppress the virus. The figures mentioned are upper limit projections and worst-case scenario plans, not predictions of deaths.
Who said Ferguson wasn’t published? I said he hasn’t been peer reviewed and that his very dangerous assumptions underlying his dangerous modelling haven’t been shared. Your confected outrage and rush to reassert your one-sided version of events is perhaps clouding your eyesight, if not your judgment.
Again, the rudeness surfaces. Your desperation to insist on your subjective views as unassailable and unquestionable make you ever more ridiculous.
What are your qualifications when it comes to science? You clearly know next to nothing about modelling and the inherent weaknesses regarding quality of assumptions. Likewise, can you tell us – based on Ferguson’s less than impressive history of forecasting – when he has been right in the past and why he should be trusted now?
Scientific papers are published after they are peer reviewed. So if Ferguson has publications, which you admit, they have been peer reviewed.
Not true.
Please find experts reviews of Fergusson’s model. It’s an embarrassment, its not merely bad it absolutely awful. It would fail peer review in every software house and any government department. A
In laymans terms its would be like reading an Phd submission written in crayon in a child like scrawl with and with a 5 year old’s grasp of grammar and spelling.
Amazing critique. Your Phd epidemiology students must fear your wrath.
from full fact (google this and you can read the full article)
A widely-shared claim on social media in Scotland and across the UK suggested that Professor Ferguson’s predictions about the number of deaths from Covid-19 were inaccurate, and he had vastly overestimated deaths from previous public health scares such as bird flu, BSE and foot and mouth disease. Similar claims also appeared in The Spectator and National Review.
Ferret Fact Service looked at this claim and found it False.
Ferguson was 10 fold off, his model and data were famously not peer reviewed.
When a highly edited and improved (by microsoft) version of his model was put online it was peer reviewed, it was deemed to:
Be bug ridden when run.
Unable to replicate any results.
Code that was genuinely laughably bad, 2000 line functions.
Breaking nearly all good practice.
Near zero automated testing.
It was basically a random number generator when it didn’t fall over. His teams arrogant replies around this showed their appalling lack of knowledge in creating good software.
So when even a part of his work has been peer reviewed it found to be so bad that its embarrassing.
His team have made dozens of prediction over the years, being merely 10x off is the highlight of his career. With swine flu they were nearer to a milion times off.
Gupta and others have been more optimistic and sadly wrong, maybe under estimating by 5 fold.
No. See Nature News June 8 “Critiqued Coronoavirus simulation gets thumbs up from code- checking efforts”
If you bother to look at the tables in Report 9 with the death stats under different mitigation scenarios you will see that the estimates for death over 2 years are looking a bit optimistic compared with where we are now particularly since they assume an Rt of 2 or greater.
It’s a superficially interesting article, unfortunately neither you nor the author have a clue about what they’re discussing.
Finding 1 obscure person to say its all good is laughable. Its not even close to correct. Real actual professionals condemned it when reviewing it because its awful and importantly untestable.
If you want a simple explanation it relies quite predictably on ‘random’, which is not uncommon. However it has no way of replaying or mocking out this randomness in testing. Not that it has any testing anyway.
Now replaying this randomness is not a great challenge to even a jnr level engineer, in fact the techniques used are key to starting good software development. Their code was so poorly structured that this was impossible. Their tech choice so old that it was more difficult. Their use of ‘goto’ laughable as it was condemned in 1970.
There is literally no way with the model as it stood it could reproduce any results – apart from maybe making a number > 1.
Respected engineers found it to be buggy and exhibit unintended random behaviour when for example loading files. This is dismissed as unimportant.
Look on the github.com reviews by professionals, academic code is a complete joke.
Its not uncommon for any of us to read something outside of our area of expertise and presume it’s correct. Funnily enough it was a woeful academic interview/article on software 7 years ago that finally stopped me reading New Scientist. All the articles on physics that I read may well have made an experienced physicist laugh etc.
In fact this is a key point to all media, when they report on something you genuinely understand you realise they have limited knowledge.
I don’t know your area of expertise, surely you get annoyed when it’s reported sp badly.
Ferguson’s model and the rationale behind it has not been made available. The peer review for the efficacy of PCR testing was completed in a day!! prior to WHO approving it. Significantly quicker than the norm. Fergusons track record in so many other areas that are widely know are laughable if it wasn’t so serious.
Ferguson’s model has been made available, including the code used to write the model. All of the assumptions and rationale were included in the published paper. Have you even bothered to read it? His team have also published about 10 paper since, further expanding on the original interview. He has also undertaken numerous interviews, including on unheard and on Parliamentary Select Committees. You just don’t want to hear the truth because you have emotionally invested in ‘Ferguson equals bad’
This is the level of ignorance we’re dealing with, people. Voicing support for an academic with a lifetime of abject professional failure but climbed the greasy pole in spite of it! Go smacking.
The level of ignorance we’re dealing with is people on the internet who’ve embraced the concept of ‘post-truth’. Where up is down and down is up.
Where professionally qualified experts with decades of experience are ‘idiots’ and some unqualified guy who didn’t even know what a pandemic was until March 2020 knows the ‘real truth’. And apparently the real truth is that the pandemic is a massive global conspiracy coordinated by Bill Gates and the ‘elites’ to undertake the ‘great reset’.
I will let people make up their own minds as to which category of people is correct.
Deaths in the first wave were down to 100 a day by June, and had almost disappeared by July. Therefore infections had all but disappeared some weeks earlier (down to 1 in 2000 by end of May according to the ONS). Keeping restrictions during late spring and summer and the associated scaremongering (positive framing as SAGE describe it), particularly over super spreading events
which simply “proved” when nothing happened that Covid 19 wasnt such a threat, is turning out to be one of the greatest public health disasters of all time.
My forecast is that no one in Government or SAGE will ever publicly admit that.
The conclusion should be the opposite. If we had kept some partial restrictions we could have prevented the second wave. It’s because we removed everything, sent the schools and universities back, that everything blew up again.
However it’s all academic. The new variant could not be controlled by anything other than a hard lockdown anyway
So it is your strong view that lockdown’s are an effective means of controlling Covid? That is based on (non-peer reviewed) modelling presumably, as the 25 or so peer reviewed comparative studies on lockdown restrictions and Covid mortality is yet to find much / any linkage. I know it is the done thing to call out critics of lockdown as anti-science, but actual (positive) measurable effects of lockdown versus no lockdown are hard to find in actual scientific literature.
There are no peer reviewed studies on global pandemics full stop. Simply because there has not been one for 100 years. We don’t have that luxury unfortunately.
However it’s self evident that lockdowns reduce viral transmission and all of the data supports that (each lockdown in the UK and most other countries, including the current one, reduces infection rates, followed by hospitalizations and death rates).
Whether they are worth the cost is impossible to know at this point, but I suspect they are not. Although telling the people who would die without lockdown that ‘their life is a good price to pay for the people who may die in the future’ is problematic.
One thing we are not short of is peer reviewed studies on the efficacy of lockdowns (and other interventions). The 25 or so I reference are all using data on Covid. Have you not seen any of them? You say that it is self evident that lockdowns reduce viral transmission – that is true. However how significant that reduction is very much open to question. What various studies have tried to isolate is how big that reduction is. The answer appears to me that lockdowns are low down the list of factors that correlate to a lower fatality rate.
Precisely. Furthermore, reducing viral transmission as a policy is short-sighted and overly simplistic. The long term strategy should be reducing fatality. Not on a daily basis, but on an annual or supra-annual basis. I feel this is exactly what the Great Barrington approach gets right.
“Although telling the people who would die without lockdown that ‘their life is a good price to pay for the people who may die in the future’ is problematic.”
I don’t see this as problematic at all. It is how we have lived life until 2020. This is the frame of mind of any noble person facing an existential threat to humanity. Additionally, the deaths are not inevitable. At risk persons can and should take precautions and also be protected. My opinion.
I think it is problematic, judging by the majority of public opinion (85% support lockdown).
As for whether we should of just asked old people to hide away while the rest of kept things going. That may well turn out to of been the best approach. But we would’ve still seen massive hospitalisation and probably would of still needed lockdowns to prevent exceeding capacity. I am not convinced such lockdowns would of been much different to what we experienced.
People also forget most of the economic damage was baked in, lock down or no lock down (people would of stopped going out and international trade is compromised)
One should perhaps bear in mind that not all vulnerable people are over 80 as is becoming apparent with the age of patients being admitted to hospitals and critical care units now.
People under 59 who are in the extremely vulnerable group number 1,269,000. This does not include those with a BMI > 30, uncontrolled or un monitored diabetes, chronic liver disease, neurological diseases (all categories with a hazard ratio > 2 of dying from Covid)
What a load of rubbish. Can you se where lockdowns and masks were implelented on a death curve for the UK? If you can, you are doingbetter than anyone else, inc Carl Heneghan.
There isn’t a single peer reviewed report suggesting lockdowns reduce fatalities. There are 22 suggesting they don’t.
This is widely accepted. It is probable they maximise eventual fatalities’ by reducing exposure and minimising immunity thereby attacking the vulnerable at a later date
No credible scientist argues lockdowns do not work. You reduce social contacts, you reduce transmission spread. It’s infectious diseases / epidemiology 101.
Whether lockdowns are worth the social / economic cost, or whether they work in the long term, is debatable. And that is what you and many others are confusingly referring to when they say ‘lockdowns don’t work’
Really? Apart from South Africa, which has a new strain, every temperate country has exhibited seasonality. Given that all respiratory diseases tend to eb seasonal, I don’t think this is a coincidence. Check out Germany on Worldometers. How did they go from being perfect citizens to being disastrous? What moral sin of extra mixing incurred the wrath of the Covid Gods?
Lockdowns do have an effect. Check out the Zoe Covid statistics and you’ll see two lockdown kinks on the 22nd November and 9th of January. Cases fell faster and rose slower at those times. However the effect is small compared to the seasonal effect driving the vast majority of chaneg in transmission dynamics.
We can’t have a hard lockdown, because people have to eat. People need to buy food. The only way the government can make lockdown harder for me is to prevent me buying food. That is not a good idea.
Since cases will be low this Summer, until the South African strain arrives anyway, exams should be back on the cards, we can’t lockdown all year, or soon we won’t be able to afford medicines to treat anybody.
South Africa is a new variant, not a strain. The same as the UK is a variant and not a strain. There are tens of thousands of variants of COVID19, but the SA and UK variants are the most signficant (in the sense they deviate more from the original virus and the changes seem to impact transmission).
I don’t deny there is seasonality. But to suggest that human social contact is not a more significant influencer is incorrect. It doesn’t matter what the season is, no social contact, no transmission. Indeed most theories on why we have seasonality believe it’s due to more social contact in confined spaces in winter than summer. Remember the infection rate began increasing in September, that was midsummer, not winter. It coincidence with schools and universities reopening. Coincidence?
ZOE is quite accurate (which I actually find surprising, but it seems to mirror the ONS infection survey, but provides results instantly rather than waiting two weeks).
I agree with you that we can’t have a hard lockdown. I don’t think we should continue with the current one much longer. Get the vaccine out as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions and hope for the best. I would focus on non economic impact restrictions only going forward. I would mandate testing and isolation (I would criminalise failure to comply). I would allow all businesses to operate as normal (but be COVID compliant). I would keep Universities distance learning only (where feasible) and work from home where possible. Unclear on schools. We shall need to keep beefing up hospital capacity.
“have” not “of”
There is no second wave in the UK as definded by all cause mortality. ‘Cases’, or rather positive tests are irrelevant. We’d probably get much the same result if we tested everyone for corona viruses every year. What’s happening now was predicted by data led analysts as opposed to modellers, all based on 50 plus years of hard epidemic data.
Go compare deaths in 2016 to 2020. ONS web site.
Sniff. sniff.
Forecaster 6 is Neil Ferguson and I claim my prize. An 80% CI with an upper bound at 29,000 daily deaths?! I dread to think what state of hysteria the country will be in if we get to that level of fatality. And I can’t even conceive what upper bound said forecaster would put at 95% or 99% confidence. Twelvety million? Sorry, not Ferguson, it’s Diane Abbott isn’t it? I’ll get my coat.
Annelise Dodds (Labour finance&shadow chancellor) makes idiots like hancock,Jenrick seem intelligent, Truly frightening people still vote for 3 ‘Blind Mice’ parties!
Why don’t you distinguish between dying WITH and dying FROM the infection in question? This distinction seems to me all-important in managing any epidemic. In the context of Covid 19 this distinction is sometimes mentioned, the next moment, however, “forgotten”. In the above article the distinction does not appear at all.
I hold the opinion, that there is no shortage of good forecasts. Rather we suffer from a shortage of moral authority. We have “created” a culture in which neither the Prime Minster nor the Archbishop of Canterbury (e. g.) seem to have any particular moral authority (not even claiming one?). The government bases its actions on supposed scientific necessity more than on asserting good will and a chosen policy.
We should rather distingusih between natural death and non-natural or “žaccidental”. Most people who have died with Covid 19 seem to me to have died naturally.
However, even natural death becomes somewhat unnatural in the light of the Covid 19 alarm. The alarm itself may also have caused extra death ““ even WITH the infection. We are to a large extent talking about people who are fragile at the outset. Some of them may be just as prone to die FROM what we could call excess treatment and/or scary circumstances and/or social isolation as from the disease itself, had it occurred under normal circumstances. I understand oxygen masks, e. g., are not only helpful, but also a burden for an already fragile body (person). Hopefully the health services around the world know how to deal with this. But under the alarm it wouldn’t be surprising if excess treatment might sometimes have occurred.
In conclusion: Human behaviour should not be “forecasted” like the weather. To forecast human behaviour is to de-humanise.
There is still, to date, no actual agreed “diagnosis” of the disease covid-19. Every other disease has a “diagnosis” by a doctor and can be backup by lab tests. Perhaps if only diagnosed covid-19 sufferers were used in stats there woud not be so much fear. Rather than tagging deaths with a PCR positive badge.
What is going to happen when people who have had the vaccination die? I like many have the flu vaccination every year but like many can still get the flue and indeed die with it.
Great question – and will we know about that?? I would say not likely. They need to watch that very closely.
Why not likely? They will look at the efficacy of their vaccines as that’s what scientists do.
Well, at a guess, if they are saying 90% efficacy I’d guess 10% may die and if 95% efficacy then 5% may die.
Don’t recall anyone saying that a vaccine meant you’d live forever.
Wakey wakey everyone before it is too late. This is about controls, lockdowns and crash the economies so badly that we have no option but to agree to their Great Reset, give away our freedoms and our assets in return for internal state support with funny money.
Think I’m making it up or a fruitcake. You are so to find out fortunately because the game is up for those that planned this tyranny.
Some evidence you can check for yourself. Check EU gold standard website, euromomo dot eu. All cause mortality country by country on a weekly basis, records going back about 5 years . This autumn and winter all cause mortality in England is around seasonal norms. And is lower than average in Northern Ireland and Scotland. In a pandemic, come on. Media reporting 1000 deaths a day, but they must be replacement deaths, not excess deaths because all cause is as normal. If your time was up this week does it make any difference if they put flu, COVID or pneumonia on your death certificate.
Most of you have children, grandchildren. If you don’t start waking up quick we will all be under communist control.
Read my comment now, because my prediction is it will be removed, by fact checkers, before long. Look back later to see if this is the case. The entire media is controlled by a few rich billionaires who want the Great Reset. Fact checking really equals censor all opinions that don’t fit the narrative. Like China.
How much will 2 pints of lager and a packet of crisps be then? Im amazed no one has pinned you down on this before.
Probably all your weekly wage Adrian if the Great Reset plan were to come to fruition. Which fortunately it won’t, because this next 10 days is the endgame. And once the Great Reset fails the virus will magically disappear. Because although it was real, and released by CCP, the intention was to get rid of Trump and bring in the Great Reset under cover of COVID.
As i say, this will not now play out. It’s all kicking off and you will see I think even in mainstream which I no longer watch or read, that today Trump has banned 200 Chinese companies from New York stock exchange.
My wife tells me from reading mainstream that even Boris is saying virus released by CCP. Which we have all known all along but they have so stringently denied.
And yes Adrian, I’ll have my 2 pints of lager and a packet of crisps while I sit back and watch the greatest show on earth playing out outside the view of totally corrupted mainstream media.
Yes the Wuhan Professor who said CCP knew about SARS2 months before it hit South Korea,Taiwan, and deaths were far higher than 3,500 quoted to WHO;;was murdered, but that was just ”Coincidence” wasn’t it..
I would be delighted if you are right about the Great Reset failing but why are you so sure it will? Please elucidate…..
And one more point for you to scoff at Aid, I don’t think we will see Biden be inaugerated.
You are misreading the site. The excess deaths in the UK are well above the prior 5 years.
As for the ‘great reset’ conspiracy, it’s laughable.
Hi JJ. Set the radio buttons on the site to show weekly stats, not cumulative. Cumulative will show high excess because of the real pandemic last spring . As the author mentions some scientists, ie the proper ones, said the pandemic was over because the curve followed the classic gomperz curve. Well basically they were just about correct. Because since late spring all cause mortality on a week by week basis, rather than cumulative has been around seasonal norms. And for further research check Ivor Cummins YouTube Channel. Watch one or two of his Viral Issue videos.
Ivor is basically a data scientist previously solving complex issues.
Using ONS own data he conclusively proves there is no pandemic.
Ivor also proves lockdowns don’t work. Using official data and dates of various lockdown actions undertaken he proves beyond doubt that lockdowns have no impact whatsoever on the direction or shape of the curve. If cases are going up they continue to go up along exactly the same trajectory.
Check him out, well worth an hour or two of your time to set your mind at rest and curb your fear. Ivor Cummins YouTube Channel on uncensored search engines should find all his work.
If it ‘Laughable’ I suggest you read UN Agenda 2030, and See Youtube Davos 2020 before they take it down,Edwin Schwab admits he Wants World to live on less than $10 daily if you WANT that get lost..even ”Jugears” Prince Charlie was wittering the Same Line ”Build back better” on MSM news yesterday.(Jan 11).before he jets off…
Good grief man. Go and have a rest.
Well ”Our” Grandchildren,Great Great Grandchildren will be in hoc to Rishi free dishes/ only £400billion and counting..Johnson inherited A relatively benign economy,save Manufacturing, he has cocked it up .with starmer,Davey,sturgeon,,Drakeford offering Nowt in Logic…
Robert, I sincerely hope Boris goes to Guantanamo as many will. I suspect though he will come to some kind of deal with Trump. To find out what’s really going on in the world this very day check out drcharlieward dot com website. And US ex CIA and Nobel prize winner Robertdavidsteele dot com.
As President Trump has been censored by all the corrupt mainstream media outlets including the BBC, I heard today he is using the podcasts on these 2 sites to get his messages out into the wider world. Lots going on and Biden will not be inaugurated.
Fundamental problem with this: Garbage in, Garbage out. Dammit, Unherd, you used to be so much better than this.
There used to be so much more Giesecke and Levitt, if that’s what you mean. I wonder why not so much now. Couldn’t possibly be that they’ve been proven wrong, could it?
The irony of an article on modelling and forecasting.
The number of deaths depends on the size of your elderly population and level of comorbidity. It’s between .03% (The Wuhan Bubble) and .08% (Italy/France Spain UK) per season.
We are about half way though the second season in the Northern Hemisphere so about 1.2% per mil.
In the UK deaths will peak around 120,000 which over two seasons 3 to 1 on influenza deaths.
Excess deaths in hospitals due to Sars Cov2 were running at 1,000 per week more recently thats moved up but the 0NS suggests treating the data with caution but it probably doubled in December due to poor shielding by the vulnerable.
Excess deaths in personal homes due to NON Sars Cov 2 has run consistently at 800 a week since the Pandemic Phase.
In the endemic phase since the winter began excess deaths spilt between hospitals Sars Cov 2 and personal homes NON Sars Cov2 about 1000/800 excess deaths. so 2,000 a week.
Overall I would expect 50,000 excess deaths from Sars Cov 2 in 2020 and 30,000 excess deaths from non Covid so a total of 80,000.
92% of all SC2 deaths are Comorbid and 96% older than 60. Until they learn to shield more effectively nothing will change so they will continue to die during the first third of the year at the same rate once we get past the January post christmas doubling.
The re sequencing of the virus has given it some additional tackiness which means it is more infectious instead of 1 10 picking it up 1.5 in 10 according to the data stats of PHE. But there are streams of scientific comment which suggests that the re sequence is not more dangerous. The increase in cases in December is societal across the Northern Hemisphere with higher positivity rates in Germany than the UK where the prevalence of the two new strains is not proven as the major SC2 player.
As respiratory illness is seasonal it will fade in May and some benefit will be gained by mixed Herd Immunity from Vaccines and Natural Immunity. Probably 40% immunity by May (20/20) and of course for anyone under 45 its not an issue statistically (388 deaths in hospital of 0-60 fit and healthy by the 16th Dec), We Might get some clearance of the mist on Long Haulers treating those with PTSD (50% for Sars Cov) and the others who have physical conditions. Some will have got better after several months. The vast majority of Sars Cov Long Haulers got better.
I prefer to use the facts and simple extrapolation and then look for surprises. For me the winter in the Northern Hemisphere looks entirely predictable with hospitalisations and deaths rising from week 40. Volume up yes but trend much as one would expect.
The only thing that has surprised me is that the 85+ group are not more careful as they dominate hospital admissions growing in the week after christmas by 25%.
In terms of policy until you tackle the shielding of the elderly and who knows going out to get the Vaccine may cause a surge nothing will change.
Who is ‘they’, how very disrespectful!
They are the people that are holding the lives of tens of millions to ransom, they are the people that are stretching the hospital capacity which policy is singularly predicated on, they are the 75+ Comorbid who after nine months are still not able to shield effectively. They are most of the people in hospital being treated for the Virus.
Well said. I read the ONS data and wonder if Patel, Hancock etc have ever looked at it. Especially when it comes to the ages of deaths. Wonder if they, or their advisors have glanced at 2016 over 75s.
The no of infections declined the last 7 days despite a 30% increase in no of tests. This is despite the non peer reviewed mutant virus that is supposed to be more infectious(I doubt it). So the infections are now in steep decline. It has been so for probably 4 days now. Pre lockdown effect. There is probably 30-40% population immunity in the UK now. If you the vaccinate a further 20% of the population most likely to die(85-80% of all deaths), it is not hard, considering lags, to imagine a daily death number below 100 by end of March. It is actually hard to imagine a number higher than 100 by end of March.
I have worked for a lifetime in heavy industry and I am a great fan of statistics – proper application is predictive and very accurate. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands statistics are used to manipulate people and the science gets a bad name. Most people do not even try to understand statistics because they feel that everything to too mathematical and difficult so the best thing to do is to try to trivialise the results.
These forecasters have made a valiant attempt to overcome this caveat but our sheer lack of knowledge in pandemics means that they could be making big errors – giving statistics an even worse name. Even if we have another pandemic 30 years from now, the results from a statistical analysis might still get it wrong – who is to say that every pandemic follows a similar pattern?
Unfortunately, almost all viruses are different and many mutate rapidly – nobody knows how this might affect figures for the future.
I would welcome more detail so that I could do an analysis myself.
This is a good piece of work but most of the arguments below do not really talk about the stats and go more to politics. Statistics are difficult to follow and at college about 90% of my contemporaries dropped out because the maths was too difficult. Politics is easy because you just have to express an opinion and everybody has one of those.
The are many discussions below about the relevance of ‘excess deaths’, about manipulation of figures because the government is evil, the ‘real’ facts in the NHS, old people would die anyway … but the stats stand alone and I assume that the interpretation has been done correctly. The ONS has almost irrefutable data on all aspects of life including Covid. The statisticians have merely to analyse that data.
There is however an insufficiency of data because the pandemic is still new to us and the longer the ONS collects information the more accurate the stats will be.
You can not forcast things that are not allowed to be anaysed or discussed in a true scientific way. Since truth and science have gone out of the winow, so has any anlysis of a predictions accuracy likewise gone out of the window. The case is totally mute and nonsensical
Since Covid is no threat to the vast majority of people, the only nightmare is the Government reaction to the inflated threat. The true nightmare may well be the harm done by rushed, highly experimental and potentially health-destroying vaccines.
More to the point, modelling is the poorest form of science if indeed one can call it science and got us into this mess in the first place with the Imperial College fear-fest.
One thing is certain from the time of Covid – do not trust science, medicine or Government. The levels of arrogance, ignorance, self-serving stupidity, delusion and incompetence at work have surpassed anything else to create this nightmare of a time for a virus which is no serious threat to most humans on the planet.
Cases do not a case make and they certainly do not a threat make when most who test positive have no symptoms or symptoms minor they are irrelevant. And when 99% of the very sick and dead were already very sick and very old, Covid was never the ‘Black Death’ science, medicine and Government have made it out to be.
Will the number-crunchers give us the stats on how many were killed by the lockdown? Will they tell us how many of the very sick and dead had previously had the Flu vaccine? Will they tell us how many were killed by treatments not Covid? Probably not.
Science can only know what it measures and mere humans, flawed and fumbling, decide what can be measured and what will be measured. Hence, the only ‘answers’ we ever get are subjectively chosen and carefully sifted to remove real and uncomfortable truths.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
On the metrics given in the article for being a good choice to be a forecaster, e.g. a good track record, then Ferguson is still a poor choice to advise the government.
Edit to add: Is he the one in the table above suggesting a peak of deaths at 25000 deaths per day?
“80% confidence interval of 892 to 5,750, means we think there’s only a 10% chance it’ll be less than 892 and only a 10% chance it’ll be greater than 5750….”
So, just more guesswork! If you had got it down to 1000 to 2000 then I might believe that it’s not just guesswork. Pointless!
Idiot politicians and their “experts” will of course take the precautionary principle and say “oh dear it might 6 or 7 thousand then”.
Models , models, models Will they never learn. We have all seen and still are experiencing the most rediculous Government response due to these very models and the “Precautionary principal” that are all loaded with if and buts, maybes and just in case. Resluts are combined then they rely on some “expert” to interpret like another Neil Ferguson. Usualy an idiot like him is wheeled into confuse already confused clowns like Bojo who like dear Neil also has a weakness, “wimmin”. We have seen exactly the same rubbish is the sister scam called climate change as global warming modles that have all created havoc with politicians and ministers who need something to blame. Get rid of them ans go back to normal. This has never happend and is clearly constructed by people with an Agenda in Davos.
Forget the models, then. Look at the excess deaths. In 2020 total excess deaths are the highest on record
If you copy & paste the below into your browser it’s interesting:
https://assets.publishing.s…
It suggests all the excess deaths occurred in the spring. Mortalities are now normal for the season. My take on this is that covid is finishing off many people who would have died of other causes in a similar timeframe. The problem is that the covid patients all need similar treatment in intensive care & that is overwhelming the system. Since the winter resurgence in the virus was predicted by just about everyone it is unforgivable that the government didn’t plan for it. Awful & irresponsible.
Probably my two favourite sayings are ‘nobody knows anything’, once uttered by a characteristically bullish Hollywood producer, I believe, and the other one being, ‘we’re all dead the end’ courtesy of my hero, John Maynard Keynes.
With these in mind, and given everyone else seems to be having a go on here and no-one will ever remember or really be interested in whether they’re wrong or right, I’m foolishly going to make a prediction with the aid of a simple, if somewhat brutal metaphor about the end of covid….
It’s going to end, in the deadly sense, in the West least ways, which is really what most of us are interested in, when, much like the seemingly interminable raging fire, it runs out of suitable combustible material for it to burn.
Fin.
Where vaccines fit into all of this remains to be seen in terms of their efficacy as an intervention in recognised vulnerable groups, overall uptake and degrees of state and social pressure, but one thing’s for sure, much like its close cousin the flu, covid is unlikely to be fatal to by far the vast majority of an otherwise healthy population bar the odd outlier, and that even includes the majority of broadly healthy superannuated people to boot.
‘Nobody knows anything’ is the famous aphorism coined by screenwriter William Goldman to express the impossibility of knowing what films would be hits and what would flop. Specifically, you could load your project with as many elements from previously successful projects, but that was no guarantee that box office lightening would strike the second or third time around. It’s the antithesis of bullishness.
What number super forecaster is Professor Neil Ferguson – aka Dr. Lockdown?
Clearly no.6 in the first chart. If the “keep score” discipline were being observed, based on his appalling track record he shouldn’t even be approached let alone consulted.
The BMJ has today urged the government to effectively abandon Lateral Flow testing due to its high level of inaccuracy (not identifying positive cases); it also accuses the government, Hancock in particular, of selective use of data, omission of data in some cases and over-reliance on mathematical modelling. See where this is heading?
Add to this that there is increasing evidence that PCR tests are unreliable the other way round (identifying too many false positives). This means all the so-called “cases” on which decisions are being made and which is what is supposed to be driving what passes for strategy or a coherent public health policy is based on utter rubbish. What a mess.
Instead of forecasting fatalities attributed to COVID, how about forecasting total mortality?
Total mortality would be less susceptible to accounting problems, and we may find that total mortality is right now close to where it would be even absent the COVID phenomenon. Or maybe we would find that total mortality is still higher than certain benchmarks would suggest it would have been absent COVID.
So, counting beans is all very nice, but some beans are not worth counting, and certain bean counting exercises miss the big picture. Like, ultimately, was COVID a big deal or not?
In the United States it is hard not to conclude that COVID contributed to “excess mortality”. (I’ve done a study.) But, the median age of death attributed to COVID is just the median age of death attributed to plain old death. So, COVID may have shifted some modest volume of fatalities ahead by several months. All very tragic, surely, but it’s not like the great tragedy imposed by Spanish Flu. The median age of death attributed to Spanish Flu was about 28 and the toll was orders of magnitude larger. So, the total of “lost years” is orders of magnitude greater than that imposed by COVID.
Finally, why can’t anyone answer a simple question: What proportion of the population has already been infected? Oh, right, we haven’t systematically measuring that. Hmm ….
Yes, we have. Look up Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK Statistical bulletins
Given the author’s business perhaps this should really be described a paid promotion rather than an article.
Also in the author’s list of failed forecasts he doesn’t include the Imperial College model which helped get us into this lockdown mess
Another Ferguson type banging on about covid deaths and ‘cases’. I watched Patel a while ago on the hopefully soon the be defunded BBC with her fearmongering language and covid death figures, then came across a Daily Mail article shortly thereafter touting the same language – both usually avoided.
I had literally just examined the latest ONS spreadsheet and was left wondering which data sets Patel and the Daily Mail had used. Over 1000 daily covid deaths? If so, where have al the cancer, heart, old age etc deaths gone. have they shrunk accordingly? Of course it’s ‘deaths with pos covid tesat 28 days’. Mmmmm…..still doesn’t add up.
The start of the article takes a swing at the likes of data driven analysers like Ivor Cummins with the Gompertz curve, established over decades of data collection. Ivor was virtually bang on with predictions for this winter so far, way back, based on estalished epidemic data. The past really does guide the future. And of course there’s the vaccine which will ‘save’ the day as spring arrives. Ah – spring when corona viruses retreat anyhow.
Sensible analysts base their analysis in this covid fiasco on all cause mortality as this is at least a constant in the fluid definition of a covid case. And as most of us don’t get ill or recover easily,(99.9 pcet) cases in under 70s are really irrelevant even if the PCR test were fit for purpose.
And why is Hancock et al not leading from the front, covering al bases like using proven preventatives and treatments such as Vit D in the correct way to prevent hospitalisation and treat acute cases.Such as Mega dose Vit C with steroids. such as Budesamide. Such as HQC/zinc. Such as Chlorine dioxide. And others being used around the world, someyimes in secret as govts don’t like cheap stuff that works.This article gives a hint.
https://www.drdavidgrimes.co…
Also come clean on how it is spread. If as is now almost certain it is aerosol then multi storey hospitals are a big spreading system. Via the liftshafts etc.
This is fun.
My forecast is that politicians will redefine the incredibly rough and ready criteria of a Covid death to suit their political objectives and make it look as if they are winning. Just in time for an election. Which means that Scotland will have zero deaths three weeks before the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May, permitting the SNP to claim victory.
But really, they will be sort-of correct, because a nice sunny April will give everyone loads of vitamin D and boost their immune systems, which kills the virus stone dead.
What is missing here is that actual real scientific anlaysis of the data is suppressed.
Forcasts are meaningless uness verified by meaningful end points. Not being alowed to show or discuss these points makes all coments on this issue null and void.
No-one can forecast anything without solid data. And, it is very clear that there are so many variables on any issue that it is almost impossible to factor in everything. Which means, any data and any forecasting will rely on a selection of factors which can only ever have a wide scope for error.
Everyone it seems is ready to count and talk about cases and deaths, however, those two factors alone can only ever bring information distortions. It would not matter if 99.9% of people registered positive if the mortality rate remained low. It would be a serious issue if, like the Flu, Covid cut across all ages, instead of one specific group in the main – very sick and very old and often in care.
We have had worse Flu seasons, which is a risk to all ages, or seems to be in this day and age anyway, than Covid.
The following must be taken into account:
1. How many cases are from a positive test, bearing in mind the PCR test is highly unreliable and many of the results are false-positives.
2. How many who test positive have no symptoms or minor symptoms.
3. How many who test positive are very sick.
4. How many who test positive end up in hospital.
5. How many who test positive end up in ICU.
6. How many who test negative are sick, in hospital or in ICU.
7. How many of those who are sick or dead were vaccinated against Flu which, studies show, predisposes to respiratory disease.
8. How many of the sick or dead took antibiotics in the previous 6-12 months, which would compromise immune function.
9. What medications were the sick or dead taking.
10. What treatments were the sick or dead given.
11. How many of the dead were categorically confirmed as having been killed by Covid.
12. How many of the dead died WITH Covid not OF Covid.
13. How many were called Covid deaths without testing positive or demonstrating Covid symptoms. In Belgium at one point they were calling all Nursing Home deaths, Covid.
14. How many of the sick or dead had robust health before contracting Covid.
And that is far from a complete list for compiling solid data about the risk of Covid or its kill rate.
It really would be super if they’d made these forecasts 12 months ago. Right now they look pretty pedestrian.
The article makes the important observation that many of those people who predicted there would be no second wave, let alone third or fourth wave, should be held to account. In the sense that they should have the same publicity about their failure as they did when they made the projection – and be given the chance to explain why they think they got it wrong.
The people involved in the Great Barrington Declaration have suddenly gone very quiet. They were suggesting we had herd immunity back in June!
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in the thread but amongst those experts who didn’t project a winter resurgence was Professor Ferguson and his Imperial modelling team. Their model presents no seasonal factors or variation to the spread of the disease whatsoever. Is that the right expert to be directing government policy I wonder?
Yes he did, read the report.
No he didn’t. His model is based on a day zero to day n disease spread, it is silent on seasonality. He did predict a second wave, true, but that was meant to arrive in the middle of the year. He did not predict that the disease would recede in the summer and increase during the winter. Of course he also predicted 200 million deaths from bird flu… Being a good forecaster is not a pre-requisite to being a government advisor.
“Of course” he did no such thing. From Nature, 08 September 2005 (my emphasis)
So if avian flu had become human transmissible, then … . But it didn’t and 200 million people didn’t die. Which is good, … .
That is good! Although worrying that he is so keen on making modelling assumptions that are not based on reality but which produce very scary forecasts.
Have you actually read Report 9 from soup to nuts or the original Nature paper in 2006 with all the Supplementals ?
“Seasonality” is a proxy word for “people behaving stupidly” – that is when it gets cold people tend to congregate with other people indoors, close together, for long periods without attempting to reduce the risks of transmission in that sort of environment. The consequence of this is an increase in Rt.
If you look at the death stat tables in Report 9 you will see that they estimate deaths over 2 years with a spread of Rts from 2.0 – 2.6 with various mitigation strategies and “Do nothing”
We are told that right now the national R is about 1.5 – 1.7. Looking at the tables it would seem that Prof Ferguson seriously underestimated mortality although his critical care bed capacity graphs don’t look too far off.
The GBD method was never given a chance . They asked to keep the vulnerable safe and allow the young and healthy out to get that immunity. In the summer the virus spread was slow and the general population did not get it out of their system. In hindsight, to prevent spread a hard a lockdown was required and to close every border and shop and deliver essentials to each home (early in feb / march) , failing which GBD had the best answer.
Off and on lockdowns have been extremely destructive and trying to put out fires one by one has been a waste of time. Summer should have been used for preparation , getting people healthy should have been a top priority too and keeping the elderly out of harms way should have started early . The virus had been suppressed all along (either by lockdown or by the coming of summer) and it was always known that viruses mutate under pressure.
All the government has tried to do, in reality, is stop hospital capacity from exceeding. It’s difficult to argue with that approach, other than perhaps they have been too cautious and should of let the hospitals ‘run hot’ or ‘hotter’. But lots of bad things can happen very quickly when you do that.
The new variant also makes the discussion academic.
If that’s all they tried to do then I feel the focus was misplaced.
Summer could have been used ( knowing that the first lockdown was for NHS capacity) to hire more staff for the nightingale hospitals that in the event of a resurgence, you would be prepared without needing to use ‘lockdown’ again. Basically the summer was wasted and NHS could be better protected if it was properly staffed and the population was healthier. I have seen reports of young casualties who are significantly obese and remarkably unprepared of the real risk. For such, maybe the best thing to do was to shelter ( and loose weight)
GBD were talking early on about mutation , allowing the herd immunity through the young and healthy . Look at India ! Even through winter the numbers are falling . 1) thinner population 2) basically a very small lockdown which failed , so they got herd immunity quickly
Hire more staff from where ? Unfortunately it is not possible to knit a critical care nurse overnight nor train a competent ICU doctor in under 7 years.
The 8,415 illegal immigrants accounted for at Dover in 2020 Dont seem to mind Pandemics..EU only controls borders,After Terrorists escape ie France 2015, Vienna 2020
They haven’t gone quiet; they have been silenced – there’s a difference. This obsessive censorship of different perspectives is becoming sinister and the blaming of dissent against the mainstream narrative for death is a sign of a regressive state of hysteria.
The GBD authors still appear on Twitter (though probably not for much longer) and Sunetra Gupta was interviewed on Radio 4 the other day, albeit she wasn’t allowed to finish a sentence by the interviewer.
You must be joking they are all over the place. They are on twitter, youtube, multiple websites, podcasts and on MSM. They are even interviewed in Parliamentary select committees. LBC is obsessed with lockdown skepticism and does it almost 24 hours a day.
They need to be brought back to explain why they got it so badly wrong.
I thought your contention was that they had disappeared – now your saying they’re all over the place.
I can’t keep up.
In the UK there isn’t a second wave if all cause mortality is used. Data driven people like Ivor Cummins use 50 plus years of basic data, extrapolation from past epidemics to predict almost exactly what we have now, also with regional variations.
If ‘cases’ or ‘positive tests’ is used, then I suppose it could be argued we have a second wave. But there again we probably have one every winter – we just don’t go around testing every healthy person in the country for a corona virus.
With all the predictions in numbers, I don’t see the subheadline’s question answered. Regardless of all of the quantifications, the nightmare will end when you wake up.
I stopped reading after “80% confidence interval of 892 to 5,750, means we think there’s only a
10% chance it’ll be less than 892 and only a 10% chance it’ll be greater
than 5750″. You may as well read your tea leafs.
There look to be some unusually pessimistic forecasters on this team, albeit with quoted uncertainties so enormous that their predictions are effectively ignorable (they are communicating to us that they are unable to make any predictions). For instance, daily deaths in the UK fell below 100 around 15 June 2020, and kept falling, to reach values in the single digits (< 10!) and stay that way for a few months. That was when the susceptible population was much larger than now, and there was no vaccine available. Yet, two of the seven forecasters predicted that the situation would be no better in 2021. Perhaps they are forecasting, for no especially compelling reason, immunity to wane, the vaccine to not work at all as it did in the Phase 3 trials (vaccine escape of a new variant, for instance), etc. That crosses the line into idle speculation.
Surely everything depends on whether the vaccines (and the interval between shots ) chosen to give the over 70s offer adequate protection against the new extra infectious variant(s) that are spreading out of control. This is a gamble and I would want to consult the very best international virologists before I offered any odds,
Often ‘super forecasters’ and algorithms rely on what has happened in the past and think that it is most likely to happen in the future. This does not work at all with a brand new virus or a brand new variant that is considerably different from the original virus. In February and March last year the government listened to old professors who declared it was just like flu and paid scant attention to WHO and international opinion.
Go watch Ivor Cummins on you tube. He has produced data driven videos through the epidemic. No algorithms. Bog standard overlaying of data and extrapolation. He has predicted this winter much as Michelle has above based on 50 years plus of data and explained regional differences. In fact most data driven analysis has forecasted this winter. It’s the Fergusons and ‘superforecasters’ of the world who have got it so wrong.
My superforecast is that charlatans and authoritarians will continue to use a virus to amass, power, money and control over the rest of us
Sack SAGE, PHE, Civil Service, NHS Quangos as they have all got it wrong and underperformed.
In the past 25 years, were a scorecard to be kept, the three people at the top for consistently getting things wrong would be Will Hutton, Polly Toynbee and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Yet they remain highly paid pundits with large followings and huge media profiles. Someone should go through all their previous articles and list how many things they got wrong- or a much shorter list of things they ever got right. Might it change anything? These three are shameless individuals, but holding a mirror to them might serve the rest of us well.
“Keep score”. How can we keep score if you don’t name your seven forecasters?
This is the most blatantly unscientific, propagandist piece of rubbish I’ve see in a long time. Has this person even LOOKED at ONS data? If they had, they’d have seen that we locked down last April AFTER the Gompertz Curve had reached its apex and had begun to fall (as expected). What’s so worrying is that the ignorant will read this shite and think it’s ‘fact’. Do UnHerd do their own Fact Checking? Have they mapped mortality rates? NB Even if you map the fraudulent Covid mortality rates (instead or excess deaths or total mortality), you can still see that ‘Covid’ aka last years cold virus, followed the normal Gompertz Curve and disappeared in the summer. Jesus wept.
I’m rather pessimistic that the vaccine rollout,is not following the results of the clinical trials.
Pfizer requires 2 doses, with second at 21 days.it give 96 % immunity. Anything longer is not proven.
The AZ vaccine again has no data.The immunity on reduced doses, may give many people lower immunity, and with a virulent virus, the vaccine may become ineffective. The advisors have,messed up the initial lockdown given wrong advice on masks, reduced social distancing..it beggars belief that this strategy will work..so I see this tragedy continuing until end of summer
Both vaccines have data showing protection on the first dose. Pfizer at 50% and Oxford at 70%. Both showed almost no hospitalisations or deaths on the first dose.
I am sure you plan to revisit these predictions and score them
Ah, but you should see my team of superforecasters. Every month for the past year they’ve been forecasting whether the Covid figures would go up or down the next month. And guess what? One of them has been right 12 times out of 12! I hope Unherd will run a profile on him. But not the remaining 4095 of them, obviously.
Well, no I haven’t, of course. The trick, in case you haven’t spotted it, is to have each of the 4096 “forecasters” simply predict a different one of the 4096 possible sequences of 12 Up/Down choices. Then one of them is bound to be correct 12 times out of 12.
So my question is, how many of these forecasters are we not being told about?
I love the sense f self satisfaction f the superforecasters! I hope they are wrong about the peak daily deaths.
I think the general idea of superforecasting is a good one. But the confidence limits here do look to be very wide, mainly on the high side. I can see that this is prudent and the future is inherently uncertain. But I’d be astonished, for example, if 20m+ doses were delivered by the end of February. Or as few as 3-4m, given that we are at least half way there already. Or a daily death toll of nearly 30K? The central forecasts look sensible and I hope they are right. I guess the extremes are more illuminating if one is told the assumptions being made, so those risks or opportunities can be addressed, where that’s possible.
Please run this experiment again but now on the assumption that the virus isn’t natural but a bioweapon?
Apparently viologists completely poo poo this idea.
Google the virology podcast ‘TWiV 664: TWiV is for the dogs’
Also, a bioweapon that predominantly kills people above the age of 80 and fat people is probably not a very good weapon. Unless China was trying to help us solve our demographic time bomb problem.
Well the hysterical reaction to it all over the world has killed or incapacitated many more people than those who succumbed directly to the virus itself and the same reaction has also crashed the West’s economy such that it will takes decades to come to the pre-Covid level. And now the vaccins will do some more mass killing among the healthy. Pretty effective weapon in my opinion.
Perhaps. But if they wanted to do that, they would of chosen a virus that kills younger people. Imagine how much damage that would caused!
Next time they will do a better job; this was just an exercise. Take a look at the 2019 Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s Annual Report and search for the word exercise.
Who are ‘they’ in your conspiracy? Countries, including the UK, do routine crisis management exercises for various events (war, pandemics, financial crises, earth quakes, cyber attacks).
I don’t know why people go for these conspiracy theories. There are enough real problems to deal before trying to deal with outlandish theoretical ones.
I got some intestines from a dead sheep on the Downs and I depend on them for all my forecasts. They have told me to ignore all the forecasts from people who claim to be forecasters.
Right, with a current hospital admission rate of 226 per 100,000, assume all 18-64 years olds caught the virus at the same time that would lead to around 86,000 needing hospital treatment.
However, how likely is that? So many have had it and I just can’t see everyone getting it the same day.
Therefore I just can’t see 60-65 being the palliative care cut off age!
Given such a preposterous scenario I can’t take the rest of the forecasts seriously.
I would like to predict that all the politicians, media, “scientists” and public/private sector actors
that have milked this virus will virtually all get off Scot free. On a more positive note there are, i predict, several hundred thousand of these characters, so over the coming years a fair few thousand will either die prematurely or become very ill. So even where there is no justice there is still karma.
Don’t throw out the Gomperz curve. Apply that to January 2020 to, say, June. Overlay a bathtub curve from March 20 to March 2021. The vaccine and herd effect should engender a reverse Gomperz curve. Next? A war most likely. The only thing that will bring perspective back.
Being one of those about exit this mortal coil. I’ve beaten the odds for a few years though, and I forecast with absolute 100% certainty the Pandemic will end fairly soon. If so many of us in the near future are about to opt out as it were, how will the experts predict any more doom? Cos’ we’ll all be gone, no coffin dodgers left. Hah! No one’s predicted that little flaw.
Just kidding I know others will fill our space. Silly old sod’s what can you do with these obsolete time wasters:-)
This article is presuming that the data used for forecasting is accurate which I do not believe it to be. My father was a meteorologist. If he had been using inaccurate data to make his weather forecasts, they would have also been inaccurate, regardless of the skill he applied.
The test used to detect ‘covid’ is a lab ‘tool’ not an actual diagnostic ‘test.’ Yet, it is still used, even with a false-positive rate of 80%. The false-positives are counted as ‘cases’ though symptoms or an infection might not be present; unheard of in the past for collecting stats on an illness. People have succumbed to illness ‘with’ the so-called virus, not ‘from’ it, but still, the deaths are attributed to ‘covid.’ With monetary incentives (in the US anyway) hospitals have much to gain by counting deaths as ‘covid.’ The CDC’s own numbers state that the percentage of deaths from actual ‘covid’ is much lower than had been previously stated. Does mainstream media make a big deal about this revelation though? No! They just keep regurgitating the fear-mongering number of ‘cases” & the number of deaths, as though they any different from past years, especially during the winter mos in the northern hemisphere, when people became ill & some died.
People are indeed becoming ill & some require more intensive care while some, unfortunately, die. This has always been the case in human history though. When a new set of symptoms appear in people, it takes time to determine what they are & how to treat the resulting illness. Attributing it to a ‘virus’ then declaring a pandemic (that lasts over a year?!) when said ‘virus’ has never even been isolated…..yet developing a savior-injection for it none-the-less, without the normal safety procedures taking place (which even then does NOT guarantee absolute safety) & spending a great deal of $$ on PR to convince people to take this injection is beyond comprehension. Until….. one stops to see WHO has benefited from the resultant lock-downs & the absolute destruction of the world’s economy as we knew it.
Super-forecasting the end to something which quite plausibly never truly existed….? Please super-forecast the end to the media-induced trance that much of humanity appears to be under.
I offer the following for weighing and consideration:
1335 days ““ A Call to Endure: Why I think we are in for the long haul.
I reckon we will be suffering restrictions until November 2023 and we must prepare for to endure a long haul. In summary:
1. God is using Covid 19 to enforce a Sabbath’s rest on the UK.
2. That Sabbath rest will last for 1335 days from the date lockdown was announced on 23rd
March 2020 until Saturday 18th November 2023.
3. This period is based on the 1335 Sundays denied proper rest since the relaxation of
Sunday Trading on Friday 26th August 1994 until the announcement of lockdown on
Monday 23rd March 2020, and follows the principle of 2 Chronicles 36:21 when the Exile
to Babylon lasted the same number of years that the land was denied its Sabbath rests.
4. This will be a stressful time. The duration of the stress, but not its nature, has been
determined by the 1335 Sabbaths’ rest denied.
The following has more details about how the prophecy appears to have been given:
https://www.pennantpublishin…
I like the idea, have you accounted for any potential leap Sundays?
A week has passed. Please post an update having used feedback available.
I love numbers, since I was a kid.
Exactly 12 months ago, the 21st January 2020, the USA recorded the first COVID case on American soil.
Fast forward 12 months and, as of today, the USA have recorded 405.440 COVID deaths exceeding the total number of deaths, both military and civil casualties, occurred during of the entire WWII.
The approx 420,000 US deaths in WW2 were mostly young men in their late teens and twenties. They would each have lost 50-60 years of life, so say 21 million lost years of life. The average age of Covid victims is ~80 year old, so maybe 4 million lost years?
An excellent article! About time for some level-headed thought.
The UK’s more shrill journalists/Commentariat/MPs please take heed (or should that be ‘herd’?)
I bet that a poltical row between the EU and GB over supply of AZ vacination allocation wasn’t factored into the calculations above. Potential disruption to the vacine here will disrupt the estimates, if the programme is hindered locally to save face in the EU.
Let’s ‘score’ the predictions in the article:
“The median estimate of the group was for the 7-day average of daily deaths to peak at 1,278, but with an 80% confidence interval of 892 — 5,750”
Bang on — actual answer (assuming no bigger peak in future) was 1,284 according to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths .
“How many vaccine doses will have been administered in the UK by the end of February […] central estimate was 12 million, with an 80% confidence interval of 6 million to 20 million”
Wrong. Actual number was over 20 million.
“April as the most likely month for daily deaths to fall below [100 per day], with an 80% confidence interval of March to August.”
Actually happened in mid-March, so within the confidence limit.
So that’s roughly half right, overall. Score 5/10.
COVID isn’t the problem; it’s the COVIDNazism that’s the nightmare. The German Nazis were in power about 12 years, so call it about a decade to defeat the British Nazis led by Fuhrer Johnson?
Oh for goodness sake ““ don’t be so childish. This is a site for grown-up comments. Wouldn’t you be happier over at Breitbart?
The French Resistance were so childish to object to German rule. They should have gone along with those sensible, mature Vichy.
“The French Resistance were so childish to object to German rule. They should have gone along with those sensible, mature Vichy.”
Crap analogy.
The French resistance betrayed marQuis &SOE agents ,they were also silent on Anti-semitism &deportations….
If you knew what you were talking about, you’d know that Unherd have been one of the few publications pursuing honest intellectual enquiry into this global fraud, from the earliest days of LockdownTV with Johann Giesecke and Peter Hitchens calling everything right from March 2020… though Unherd have been spectacularly absent on exposing the fraudulent statistics (apart from Carl Heneghan’s call out of PHE’s rubbish), the garbage PCR testing which is the foundation of the entire fraud, the lies of the NHS and the sociopathic immorality of the COVIDNazis. For that, you have to go to Ivor Cummins’ channel, interviews on talkRadio, James Delingpole’s podcast and the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast. It’s like Unherd got a ton of viewing figures from providing credible journalism, then decided to give up and become a repository of fluff pieces (Tom Chivers being the worst offender for writing utter nonsense).
You lose all credibility by claiming that Giesecke “call[ed] everything right from March 2020″.
In his UnHerd interview in April and elsewhere, Giesecke predicted an overall Covid IFR of 0.1%, saying it was the same as the seasonal flu.
Giesecke’s epidemiological predictions have been spectacularly wrong.
As the vast majority of epidemiologists including Imperial’s Neil Ferguson correctly predicted from the outset, the IFR is nearer to 1%.
Giesecke also made outlandish claims about seroprevalence, saying most people had already been infected by April. And he said Norway, Denmark and Finland would catch up with Sweden’s deaths.
All demonstrably false.
It is tragic that you cannot see this even now with the benefit of 9 months of hard data from around the world. But it is more tragic that contrarian epidemiologists like Giesecke, who was always one of a small minority, prepared you so badly for the reality of what was to unfold. That is on Giesecke not you. It is also on UnHerd, whose editors apparently sought to create false balance/equivalence between Giesecke’s and Ferguson’s views, when in reality the vast majority of epidemiologists disagreed with Giesecke all along.
Whatever happened to seasonal flu?
When did Ferguson become an epidemiologist?
How do you know that IFR is near to 1%?
1. As well as being roughly 10x less lethal overall than Covid, seasonal flu has a much lower R0 than Covid, so inter alia the measures to reduce spread of Covid appear to have reduced flu transmission.
2. Professor Neil Ferguson is an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, one of the top universities in the world. So I have no idea what you are on about there.
3. There is a lot of data and analysis published by the world’s leading epidemiology departments, including at Imperial, Harvard etc, placing the overall (not age specific) IFR at around 1%. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, professor of risk at Cambridge and president of the Royal Statistical Society, says the same. These are mainstream experts, not fringe voices like Giesecke, Ioannidis who are widely discredited in the epidemiological community.
If you want links to sources, I’ll provide.
Please provide sources that prove that Covid is 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu. By the way using the expression “appear to” won’t cut the mustard. You need to cite evidence based peer reviewed papers.
My comment about the esteemed Ferguson was ironic but wasted on you obviously. He doesn’t have a very good past record does he?
How can you place the IFR at 1% if you don’t have a true figure for total infections? The testing procedure is unreliable, the number of actual Covid deaths reported is unreliable and the number of asymptomatic cases is unknown/unreliable.
I don’t know what the true rate is. I don’t know how much more lethal covid is compared to flu, but you pretend that you do. And to refer to Ioannidis as widely discredited is a statement unworthy of anyone seeking truth and balance.
I’m not placing IFR at 1%, I’m merely pointing out that the weight of the latest data suggests that it is closer to 1% than 0.1% overall.
Accordingly, the weight of evidence does not support Giesecke when he told Unherd the IFR is around 0.1%.
E.g.
https://www.nature.com/arti…
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/…
https://www.medrxiv.org/con…
https://www.medrxiv.org/con…
And this from Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter:
https://mobile.twitter.com/…
Thanks for dealing with the toddler tantrum.
It is frustrating that lockdown advocates seem to think this is all a numbers game. The point is not whether Giesecke or Ferguson (or whoever you chose) were right about the numbers (in fact, if Giesecke is going to be represented as saying it was 0.1% – they were both equally wrong/right – it seems to be between 0.23 and 0.5% with wide variation by age by the latest published estimates).
The point is one correctly said you could not suppress the virus out of existence and the current way of handling the virus was not sustainable (you can’t and it is demonstrably not).
There remains no reliable indication that the virus trajectory has been impacted by any level of restrictions or none at all. Data from Wuhan can’t be considered reliable as a demonstration of the effectiveness of their lockdown – for the same reason that you couldn’t trust data coming from North Korea – they are both totalitarian states, you would need to be an idiot to believe them and inhumane to copy them. Yet Ferguson has expressed his admiration for China in this pandemic and reported – as giddy as a school girl – in the Times that SAGE couldn’t believe they could ‘get away with it‘ here.
That’s why we are more interested in the opinions of the Giesecke’s of this world rather than the Ferguson’s, and think we are all the worse off for following the later rather than the former.
Thanks for dealing with the toddler tantrum.
I fear the suppression and Zero Covid zealots were living in dream land, putting bigger bolts on the stable door etc. For meaningful suppression in the UK early Feb 2020 was probably the last time this was plausible, after that track and trace couldn’t work. Germany and other parts of Central/Eastern Europe that did well in the 1st wave suggest that it didn’t work great in the long term.
We needed to adapt to the reality of a virus with a well known highly vulnerable group and increase capacity to handle a 2nd wave, and get ready for a vaccine rollout (which would have be optimistic, but well placed).
The track and trace fiasco stopped preperation for a 2nd wave. There are so many options not used. The private sector has continually offered to help from testing, temp health facilities, vaccine logistics – but the power hungry zealots want a massively centralised approach.
Track and trace was not the issue. We tested, tracked and traced more than any other major country on the planet (per capita)
The problem is people ignored the isolation requirement. Testing is almost pointless if people just carry on as normal after being tested positive.
The government should of made it a criminal offense to ignore a isolation request. But it was not politically feasible.
Not really. Singapore? Denmark?
Australia? New Zealand?
New Zealand is an isolated and sparsley populated landmass of five million people spread across two islands – you stand a reasonable chance of sitting out the actual apocalypse in New Zealand! Frankly, using them as an example can’t be a serious suggestion.
I notice you are,again, unconcerned with the harms caused by lockdown and the suspension of liberties (hence the reference to Australia, which in some provinces has been made a Hell on Earth).
Could there be some other natural explanation for the better health outcomes in the far East? Maybe an innate immunity based on prior exposure to other Coronaviruses? Given we’re talking about discrepancies of an order of magnitude between them and the west (as opposed to the incremental benefits of policy),and the different policies were – themselves – not homogeneous across the region – shouldn’t we at least consider that possibility before indulging the Chinese habit for dystopia?
That is ultimately all I am saying – there is ambiguity about the efficacy of suppression, as there is about the virulence of the virus. The horror of lockdown, however, is irrefutable (unless you are enjoying this, for whatever reason), as is the immense human suffering it is catalysing (to say nothing of the loss of liberty for you, your children, your grandchildren etc).
Therefore, on a cost benefit analysis, should you not find a different strategy? Why is the default the worst thing you could possibly choose? Where is the precedent for doing this?
I respectfully suggest you are too uni-focused on who has the most accurate numbers.
Are they worse off in Australia? New Zealand? I think not.
And I know you are not influenced by the hard numbers, but no, Giesecke and Ferguson were not equally wrong/right. True, there is wide variation by age, but the overall number is closer to 1% than 0.5% (I refer you to Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and others in the scientific mainstream). Needless to say, in terms of public policy, there is in any event a world of difference between the 0.1% figure and 0.5%. 5X!
You have to be careful with the 1% estimate.
Check out the ONS graph of ecess deaths in London, including the number of Covid deaths.
You’ll note that before May a lot of people were clearly dying from Covid. But from May up to Christmas, although up to a quarter of people were dying of Covid, deaths were not higher than the average.
How is that possible?
Simple. Covid was clearly the majority of sesonal deaths. So when people are dying they are dying of Covid, rather than something else such as Pneumonia. Covid has displaced Pneumonia for people dying of old age, and is likely to do so in the long term.
Since at least 1% of people die every year (or they’d on average live past 100) it is important to account for this when looking at the stats.
If we measured the number of people testing positive for the common cold and dying within 28 days, we’d see a very similar graph to the one we are seeing for Covid cases, and we need to adjust for this statistical quirk when considering the true Covid mortality.
NOTE:Edited March to May – my mistake
Not correct. From mid-October to Christmas, the overall death rate was 10% (around 1,000/week) more than the worst of the last ten years.
Sorry Richard, I meant May, not March.
And also I was refering to the London statistics, where the first wave had already passed, and where there seems to be an increase on seasonal deaths, but what appears to be a small one compared to the total number of cases.
The overall deaths includes the Midlands, and the North, which are still suffering from the original strain, and whose deaths are clearly more than seasonal.
I encourage you to look at the ONS graphs for London and the Southe East published today. It is hard to interpret the cases over the holiday I agree, but up to Christmas, the increase in Covid deaths tracked the seasonal increase in deaths.
I suspect that the second waves in the North are due to the original strain spreading, and then dying off.
I suspect many people are catching the new strain in London and the South East, and that is the cause (combined with the season) of the uptick in cases there. If those people have already caught the first strain, then I would expect seasonal deaths to be little higher in the South East than in previous years.
The great strain on the NHS in the South East is almost certainly caused by staff having to excuse themselves due to testing positive for Covid. I believe that this is a good reason to lock down, and I understand why the government message is contextless, but the ONS graphs tell a different story about why the NHS in the South is currently having another winter health crisis.
You are only half correct. I am happy to ignore COVID deaths and go with excess. However in total these are remarkably similar (excess deaths are about 10% lower, suggesting the phenomenon you reference is only a small issue)
See Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter’s statistical analysis showing most who are dying from covid are far from death’s door and would have had many years of life ahead.
Giesecke called a bad flu season 0.2% IFR, which Ioannidis’ WHO-accepted bulletin backed.
The trolls are in.
“If you knew what you were talking about, you’d know that Unherd have been one of the few publications pursuing honest intellectual enquiry into this global fraud, from the earliest days of LockdownTV with Johann Giesecke and Peter Hitchens calling everything right from March 2020… though Unherd have been spectacularly absent on exposing the fraudulent statistics (apart from Carl Heneghan’s call out of PHE’s rubbish), the garbage PCR testing which is the foundation of the entire fraud, the lies of the NHS and the sociopathic immorality of the COVIDNazis. For that, you have to go to Ivor Cummins’ channel, interviews on talkRadio, James Delingpole’s podcast and the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast. It’s like Unherd got a ton of viewing figures from providing credible journalism, then decided to give up and become a repository of fluff pieces (Tom Chivers being the worst offender for writing utter nonsense).”
Twitter tantrum.
UnHerd have been very good in allowing alternative views about the virus. All of these sounded plausible at the time, but it’s not clear to me that any of them have been remotely accurate. The general tenor – and I’m thinking of people like Professor Gupta back in April – was that there was a lot of pre-existing immunity in the population and the virus would pass through, certainly by this winter, and without the high number of deaths we have seen. Sadly, this is not turning out to be true.
Yep, Gupta was wrong on a winter resurgence. So was Neil Ferguson and the Imperial modelling team. Their model included no seasonal factors or variation whatsoever. The difference between these two equally wrong experts is that one is setting government policy and the other is considered a dangerous incompetent. Perhaps a better outcome would be that both experts were treated with healthy scepticism?
Idiot. Go and find another government building to storm.