Here’s another way to think about the probability issue. Suppose you think Neil Ferguson is right, and 250 000 people will die from Covid-19 if there is mitigation but not lockdown. (By mitigation Ferguson means case isolation, including household quarantine, for anyone who has it, and social distancing for the elderly.) And suppose you think […]
One other thing to say about my Covid-19 and decision theory post is that I have assumed in my toy models that if Covid-19 turns out to be a mass killer, the lockdown would have been successful at preventing those mass deaths. But of course this is itself very dubious. There’s not much good evidence […]
The UK government (and various other governments around the world) have decided, at least in effect, that the expected utility of having a lockdown is greater than the expected utility of not having a lockdown (or that the expected disutility of having a lockdown is less than the expected disutility of not having a lockdown). […]
People are asking me on Twitter what my ‘core thesis’ is on Covid-19. I don’t really have one, but the closet thing to a core thesis I have involves risk-benefit analysis and decision theory. A little explanation of this would be in order first. (If you already know this sort of thing, feel free to […]
In case you can’t read it, here’s the text off the Financial Times’ recent story on Neil Ferguson, including quotes from him. As the FT notes, things are as still as clear as mud. Imperial’s Neil Ferguson: “We don’t have a clear exit strategy” Financial Times April 7 2020 By Jemima Kelly There’s […]
After talking to the ONS (by Twitter and e-mail) I’m somewhat clearer now about what they’re doing, and while it’s confusing, it’s not quite as bad as I thought and at least it hasn’t made the respiratory death figures useless. ONS now has a separate category for Covid-19 deaths, which includes all deaths where Covid-19 […]
A comment on my blog: Mr Drummond, I’ve seen your latest graphs on Twitter (which I don’t normally use or else I’d ask you this there). If they show deaths up to 27th of March, a date when there had been approx. 1,000 CV19 deaths, then won’t future graphs actually show something significant […]
The worldwide lockdowns have clearly been driven by academic panic-merchants like Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team, and a hysterical media. But you’d also have to say that the Chinese behaviour has equally driven it. If China had been open all along, and told other countries that it looked like there was another SARS-type illness around, […]
When I posted the graphs based on the ONS data for week 10, lots of people (mainly on Twitter, not here) said, ‘You have to wait a couple of weeks, then you’ll see something that will make you wet yourself in fear’. Well, we’ve now got the graphs for three weeks later than that first […]
Euromomo has updated deaths stats out. They give the impression that they go up to the end of week 13 (March 27), although in fact for a lot of countries the stats only go for half the week, and the rest of the week is a prediction (more on this below). It looks like we […]
Another of my readers, Laurence Hodge, has done a graph for me. This one charts deaths from 2018 to the end of week 12 of 2020 (this is the blue line), with the the five-year average plotted as red dots for comparison (click to enlarge). Figures from the ONS.
Lots of journalists are chasing me for a ‘chat’ at the moment. I learned from my time in academia that this is not an efficient use of time, 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 […]
So our indefatigable graph-makers David Clark (who does this sort of thing for a living) and Robert Watson (retired Professor) have been hard at work making some updated graphs based on the latest ONS figures, released 31 March. The figures go up March 20 (the end of what their system calls week 12). When I […]
I’ve been looking for the weekly or monthly Italian death stats (all deaths, not Covid-19 deaths). Looks like they are not publicly available, which is rather remarkable. Even the Italian National Statistics Institute doesn’t publish them, although I expect they have them. EUROMOMO However, this site has been mentioned by a few people on the […]
Here’s a remarkable story that no-one in the media or social media has picked up on (although you can bet that everyone in the field knows). So we have two epidemiological teams, one at Imperial, and one at Oxford, with differing ideas about Covid-19. The Imperial team, led by Prof. Neil Ferguson, is the team […]
So there’s been a lot of talk about Neil Ferguson’s history of alarmism, including his work on BSE, foot and mouth and swine flu. What I’d like to do here is to crowd-source some information. If anyone has any has any more knowledge or recollections or links about how he has performed in the past, […]
[Update: For Breitbart readers I need to make it clear that 2020 respiratory deaths are actually below the five-year average. Yes, below, not above, as Dellers assumed in his article. I didn’t spell this out enough in the text. HD] Two brilliant readers of this blog have taken the time to graph up the relevant […]
This copper’s justification for this ridiculous bit of heavy-handed policing by Derbyshire Police is pure police state reasoning: By AndyRozza’s logic, any time the NHS gets full then we’re into police state mode, where no-one, except the police and essential workers, is allowed outside. We’re only free to leave the house if there are available […]
I had a look through the England and Wales weekly death stats for this year so far and previous years. The 2020 figures provided nothing to be worried about. They’re here if you want to look yourself. I couldn’t find them in line graph form (the Office for National Statistics don’t do that, which is […]
We’re constantly told that we’re going to be Italy in a few weeks (although that few weeks seems to be rather a moveable feast). But are Italy’s higher figures are in large part due to the way Italy records deaths? Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record […]