AES":zpmwpyky said:
I said they were grossly negligent, not deliberately setting out to massacre people.
Yes, what they did was adapt their pandemic flu model and change various assumptions to reflect what they knew about this coronavirus. What they failed to do, and have admitted not doing, was to change the load on the NHS to reflect the demands placed by this coronavirus on general hospital and ICU wards. Instead, they left the NHS demand assumptions at the same % as used for viral pneumonia in their original pandemic flu model. As a consequence, and based on the projections on those assumptions, they reached the conclusion that the best strategy was to let the virus spread, and then incrementally up the social distancing to manage the load on the NHS so it was never overwhelmed.
There was then a worldwide outcry from epidemiologists, including the WHO and pretty much everyone not bound in with the UK govt policy that the policy was nuts, demanding to see the model. Boris announced the modelling would be released. 10 days later, the Imperial College paper was released (in place of the model itself, which remains undisclosed) in which they stated that their original recommended strategy would have led to 250k deaths but was not viable. In an interview with the FT Neil Ferguson (now in isolation, the lead Professor of the IC team) admitted this was because they had used the viral pneumonia NHS load statistics, which did not reflect any COVID-19 data, it being a much worse disease as we are seeing with our own eyes. In the paper, they admit that the policy they had advocated (and the government had followed) of mitigation by allowing the epidemic to spread but mitigating how fast could not be achieved and with the correct NHS demand load based on COVID-19 rather than viral pneumonia resulted in the NHS surge capacity being exceeded by over 800%.
So no, I do not believe those people did their best. The modelling was negligent. It was clearly negligently audited.
They embarked on a plan of relatively light social intervention to favour economics and freedom, at the cost of 250k planned deaths. OK, that is a trade off any public health initiative has to adopt. But, they did so on the basis of favouring a model from Imperial College (there were others, some by people who were screaming at the govt that their strategy was insanely destructive) which gave them a figure they thought was acceptable based on an obviously and seriously incorrect assumption. And clearly did not audit the modelling to pick up the carried over false flu assumption. And it would have killed c1.5m instead of 250k, because they were assuming the death rate would be ~1% because the NHS would be within capacity. If the NHS gets overwhelmed (as it will do in London in 7-10 days, and is likely to do elsewhere in 3-4 weeks given the lack of seriousness of the interventions to date) the death toll from the experience of Wuhan and Lombardy is likely to be 6% of confirmed cases rather than 1%, ie ~1.5m dead.
So no, I do not think everyone has done their professional best. The absence of effort in the containment phase was driven by the assumption that the epidemic could be managed for herd immunity within NHS capacity. That assumption led to a nonchalance about the initial spread of the virus - it was quite desirable to set up immunity among schoolchildren for example - because they thought they could throttle it down later. All that was based on the completely negligent failure to update health service load to reflect actual experience with this coronavirus in all the other countries ahead of us.
True. Doesn't mean you and I have not been negligent. I haven't personally been this negligent.
The Imperial College team was sloppy and arrogant. The government then took it easy and ignored alarm bells from 360 degrees, because they liked the answer the IC model gave and didn't audit it.
OK. It helps to understand what happened though. This makes Grenfell Towers public policy failings look like a mere nothing. It's OK for someone on the Imperial College not to update that critical assumption - that sort of thing happens all the time - it's up to the rest of the team to test, retest and re-re-test it before recommending govt action. It's then on the government to take all the models it is presented with and audit them all with microscopic detail before deciding on a course of action. The government set its strategy in February. On being forced under public pressure to publish the model, it took 10 days for Imperial College to realise their catastrophic error and then more time consumingly negotiate all the twisty corridors as to how to deal with that publicly. It wasn't hard to find.
I have never seen a worse bit of governance.
