Lots of journalists are chasing me for a ‘chat’ at the moment. I learned from my time in academia that this is generally a waste of time, or worse, so I thought I’d put up a list of soundbites instead that they can use if they want.
Just to make clear, scepticism about Covid-19 is only scepticism about the horror stories that are supposedly just around the corner. Clearly the Covid-19 virus (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2) is real, it’s nasty, and it kills people, and you don’t want to get it. The question is, is it really a once-in-a-century mass killer, or just another another bad winter virus like flu? I’m not saying that it definitely, 100% guaranteed, isn’t World War 3, but it looks pretty unlikely that it is, and I want better evidence to justify such an enormously damaging governmental response.
Anyway, here are the soundbites/bullet points.
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1. ‘Better safe than sorry’ applies to the economy as much as health. In fact more so, as the economic damage is certain, whereas the health scare is hypothetical, and low-probability.
2. The onus of proof is very much on those who would impose such a drastic and damaging lockdown upon British society. It is not upon those who are not convinced by the necessity for it.
3. We have no way of checking Ferguson’s models for reliability, and their track record is abysmal.
4. The data Ferguson is using to justify his figures (as described in his paper) is extremely flimsy. There is, as yet, no quality data on Covid-19 which entitles us to make any good predictions, let alone recommending one of the most economically-damaging courses any Western government has ever undertaken outside of wartime.
5. Ferguson’s mathematical-computational model is a black box, which he, despite promises, has not released the code for, or at least the details of what it is doing. Why has the government not demanded he make it available for public release, and then let loose a swarm of experts over it?
6. If Covid-19 is relatively infectious, has been around at least since mid-November in China (and probably earlier), and millions of Chinese tourists (and others who would have caught the virus elsewhere) have been coming into Britain since then — Britain still has not closed its borders — why is there not the slightest sign of it in the latest ONS death figures (currently up to 20 March)? Why is the answer not, ‘It’s not that fatal to most people’, rather than ‘It’s extremely fatal, but the exponential explosion hasn’t started yet’. We’ve been hearing the latter for a month now.
ONS stats here.
Graphs based on these stats here.
7. If the situation is so uniquely horrendous that the British people must remain under house arrest for an indefinite period then why are the borders still open, especially from the more infected countries such as China and Italy?
8. Why has the government or the ONS not released and publicised any graphs based on the ONS all-death figures? Even I have been able to do this.
9. Neil Ferguson says in his paper that his mind was changed by the Italian death numbers in mid-March. Yet it has been reported that the Italians have been recording any death of someone who died with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death, which has inflated the numbers.
10. Why has the UK government not demanded that the Italians make their all-death weekly records publicly available? How can we be making historically important decisions based on a country that keeps its weekly all-death records away from public scrutiny?
11. Why has the ONS recently changed its method of recording deaths to the Italian method in which any death of someone who had, or was suspected of having, Covid-19, is now classed as a Covid-19 death? Flu deaths are not recorded like this.
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1244908634649362433
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving-the-coronavirus-covid-19/
12. Why was Neil Ferguson so supremely confident of the success of the lockdown a mere three days into it, when previously he had said that it may well last up to 18 months? On what basis is he so confident?
13. How is that a virus can be a once-in-a-century mass killer, yet be incapable of killing children? Why is it that the vast majority of the deaths are in vulnerable elderly people, the sort of people who normally die in flu epidemics?
This one’s not exactly a soundbite, but it’s important:
14. Ferguson told the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee that he has revised his estimate of R0, that is, the average transmission rate of Covid-19, up to 3.0, which is relatively high. However, as far as I am aware he has not said anything about how this affects his estimates of the fatality rate. But in this situation, where neither figure is known with any reliability, a revision of one almost certainly requires a revision of the other. A virus with a higher transmission rate would result in a much larger spread amongst the population in the same time as a virus with a lower transmission rate, but that means that we are dividing the deaths into a higher figure, resulting in a lower fatality rate.
https://committees.parliament.uk/download/file/?url=%2Foralevidence%2F237%2Fdocuments%2F1908%3Fconvertiblefileformat%3Dpdf&slug=oe00000237pdf
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