Thursday 9 April 2020

Crude death rates are very misleading and Neal Ferguson is pretty unreliable

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Today 17,700 people in Italy are reported to have died of Coronavirus this year. In fact they died with the virus, rather than necessarily of it. 

91% were over 60. 

81% were over 70. 

I suspect that most of these people would have died even had they not contracted the virus. (Two thirds of deaths would have happened anyway guessed Prof Neal Fergusson - not my favourite person nor Boris Johnson's, since he brought the virus to No 10 Downing St. that infected so many ministers and others.

Scottish deaths announced today on the BBC are in much the same age range and the same caveats apply.



As for Professor Ferguson, he has got things badly wrong in the past. He is the man responsible for Boris instituting a lockdown. In contrast his former colleague Sunetra Gupta produced research suggesting the virus may have infected up to half of Britons, and that less than one in a thousand may be at risk of serious illness. In other words the UK was well on the way to herd immunity before the lockdown.

Scientists dislike Ferguson’s model because they are not sure he has one. His modelling consists of several thousand lines of dense computer code, with no description of which bits of code do what. He himself says


“For me the code is not a mess, but it’s all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it."

1 comment:

  1. Theonna Crihan commented: If you are lucky and don’t die, above a certain age, it is very likely that you’ll have serious consequences of covid, like a traheotomy. I know only 3 people who had it. All 3 men. One 41, one 44 and one 52. All healthy. The 41 lost 6kg in 1 week, the 44 and 52 intensive care, the 52 has now a traheotomy.So I don’t believe the above at all.

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