Should the government have relied on Neil Ferguson’s advice

[Skimpot flyer]

Dr Vernon Coleman thinks not...

In summary, this gentleman was a regular on tv in the 70’s and 80’s, appearing on various news-related programmes to explain in layman’s terms about medical issues of the day. Those appearances started to dwindle after he wrote books criticising the medical establishment and it’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.
In this video, he states some facts about the past forecasts of Neil Ferguson, his team at Imperial College, and the 13-year old computer code that was actually designed for use with a Flu outbreak...

 

[edwin_m]

I suggest you look him up on Wikipedia before deciding how much weight to put on this opinion.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

A 5-second search on google verifies that Ferguson did predict 200 million deaths from Bird Flu. Why did that prediction not cause consternation in government circles and an immediate rush to implement lockdown?

Bird flu pandemic 'could kill 150m'

A global influenza pandemic is imminent and will kill up to 150 million people, the UN official in charge of coordinating the worldwide response to an outbreak has warned.

www.theguardian.com

 

[Skimpot flyer]

The Spectator (ironically, a bloke called Boris Johnson once wrote for them) also has an article that makes the same observations as Dr Coleman

Six questions that Neil Ferguson should be asked

It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to...

www.spectator.co.uk

 

[Skimpot flyer]

... https://www.newscientist.com/articl...s-of-swine-flu-spread-supports-pandemic-plan/

 

[NorthOxonian]

A 5-second search on google verifies that Ferguson did predict 200 million deaths from Bird Flu. Why did that prediction not cause consternation in government circles and an immediate rush to implement lockdown?

Bird flu pandemic 'could kill 150m'

A global influenza pandemic is imminent and will kill up to 150 million people, the UN official in charge of coordinating the worldwide response to an outbreak has warned.

www.theguardian.com

Personally, I don't like Ferguson. I think his actions during lockdown really showed his true colours - happy enough to force us under lockdown but not willing to accept it himself. And I think some of his past predictions have been wildly inaccurate.

But they won't have just relied on him, they'll have spoken to a range of scientists. He isn't the only one calling the shots, and I certainly wouldn't trust the likes of Vernon Coleman any more than him.

 

[Starmill]

The government didn't, as is claimed, put all of their trust in him and his team.

What the government did do was stubbornly refuse to publish the modelling, which caused a serious error to be missed, for days, stubbornly refuse to tell us the others whom they were taking advice from, and stubbornly refuse to internalise and execute the recommendations of the World Health Organisation, with Jenny Harries famously declaring the British exceptional because "the clue is in the name - World Health Organisation".

If they had, we'd be in a much better position than now. Furguson has little to do with it.

 

[Starmill]

happy enough to force us under lockdown but not willing to accept it himself

To be fair, this is inaccurate. He didn't ask for so-called lockdown, and it certainly wasn't his decision to make.

 

[LAX54]

A 5-second search on google verifies that Ferguson did predict 200 million deaths from Bird Flu. Why did that prediction not cause consternation in government circles and an immediate rush to implement lockdown?

Bird flu pandemic 'could kill 150m'

A global influenza pandemic is imminent and will kill up to 150 million people, the UN official in charge of coordinating the worldwide response to an outbreak has warned.

www.theguardian.com

Maybe partly due to no Social Media (FB started in 2004) H5N1 was in 2003, and possibly not so much rolling news as there is now ?

 

[158756]

Maybe partly due to no Social Media (FB started in 2004) H5N1 was in 2003, and possibly not so much rolling news as there is now ?

The word 'could' is doing a lot of work in that headline. According to the WHO official quoted 'outbreaks of bird flu ... could mutate into a form transmittable between people.' A bird flu pandemic hasn't killed large numbers of people (so far) because there hasn't been a bird flu pandemic in humans - that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a serious problem if there was. The novel coronavirus on the other hand certainly does transmit from person to person.

 

[SuperNova]

I love how the right wing press have managed to make Neil Ferguson the fall guy for government failings, the day the number of deaths in the UK topped the whole of Europe. I despair how easily people buy into it, as it suits their political views.

 

[johnnychips]

Scientists generally disagree with each other as much as politicians. This is a healthy academic trait. One would hope that the government has listened to a range of scientists’ opinions before making their decision.

 

[Bantamzen]

To be fair, this is inaccurate. He didn't ask for so-called lockdown, and it certainly wasn't his decision to make.

No he really did advise pretty much all of the lockdown conditions.

Scientists generally disagree with each other as much as politicians. This is a healthy academic trait. One would hope that the government has listened to a range of scientists’ opinions before making their decision.

Quite honestly I suspect they didn't. This government does not seem to be the kind of administration that steps back and takes stock of all the evidence, instead being a knee jerk, reactionary type as evidenced by doing the U-turn on the herd immunity model to following the Imperial College model when the infamous quarter of a million deaths number was mooted.

 

[sjpowermac]

I love how the right wing press have managed to make Neil Ferguson the fall guy for government failings, the day the number of deaths in the UK topped the whole of Europe. I despair how easily people buy into it, as it suits their political views.

Agreed, a classic case of ‘let’s bury the bad news’.

The Spectator ‘journalist’ has been selective about what the Imperial team said in relation to Swine Flu:

‘But while the speed of spread is now better understood, researchers say they need more data to assess how dangerous the new virus is.’

The article in the ‘New Scientist’ is hedged with caveats.

I love how just as Brexit unearthed millions of previously unknown economists, the virus has done a similar job for mathematical modellers...

 

[sjpowermac]

The word 'could' is doing a lot of work in that headline. According to the WHO official quoted 'outbreaks of bird flu ... could mutate into a form transmittable between people.' A bird flu pandemic hasn't killed large numbers of people (so far) because there hasn't been a bird flu pandemic in humans - that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a serious problem if there was. The novel coronavirus on the other hand certainly does transmit from person to person.

Very good post. I’m not entirely certain that the Spectator ‘journalist’ or the original poster have actually read any of the articles quoted.

 

[Yew]

I find that the last two questions are the most interesting, what assumptions were made in the model, are they reasonably valid for this situation (I feel that I'm going to have to read the paper now)? And what is the codebase like, knowing academic code, I imagine it's a mess of R code, with no unit tests or proper source control. Whilst that doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusions, it's not an encouraging sign of reliability.

 

[Bantamzen]

I find that the last two questions are the most interesting, what assumptions were made in the model, are they reasonably valid for this situation (I feel that I'm going to have to read the paper now)? And what is the codebase like, knowing academic code, I imagine it's a mess of R code, with no unit tests or proper source control. Whilst that doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusions, it's not an encouraging sign of reliability.

Ugh, R! That language makes me want to throw my work's laptop out of the window! But seriously hearing that the model was derived using 13 year old code designed for influenza (remember covid is not like influenza we've been told over & over again) doesn't exactly inspire confidence in it, especially when previous models for other epidemics have been shown to be inaccurate.

 

[Yew]

Ugh, R! That language makes me want to throw my work's laptop out of the window!

For reference, that was a guess, rather than anything gained from inside knowlege.

 

[JamesT]

For reference, that was a guess, rather than anything gained from inside knowlege.

The cleaned up version is available athttps://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim
The description says the model is written in C++, though there appears to be some Python and R to support it.

 

[edwin_m]

But seriously hearing that the model was derived using 13 year old code designed for influenza (remember covid is not like influenza we've been told over & over again) doesn't exactly inspire confidence in it, especially when previous models for other epidemics have been shown to be inaccurate.

It may be a different virus but surely the basics are the same. It has an incubation period, R number etc and it's spreading in the same population. Assuming the model allows these basic parameters to be tweaked to match the known characteristics of a particular virus, it's not sensitive to what exactly that virus is.

And where the characteristics are unknown, as they were with swine flu and still are with Covid-19, the scientists will run a range of predictions to see what the worst case is. Unfortunately journalists and those with an axe to grind will tend to jump on one of the extreme cases, either the mildest or the most severe depending what they are trying to prove.

The role of government is to listen to the advice, preferably from several sources, and decide if the worst cases are credible and if so what must be done to avoid/manage them. The UK government seemed originally seemed to be pivoting towards the herd immunity theory, when even the most basic of calculations indicated it would either overwhelm the NHS or take several years of restrictions to achieve its goal. At the same time other countries such as Italy, with fairly similar characteristics, were heading rapidly into large numbers of infections and imposing lockdowns. We didn't do that until several weeks later (relative to our progress through the outbreak) which allowed it to grow by a factor of about 10 in the meantime.

Now we have the situation where various right wing interests are insisting on significant relaxation of lockdown for economic reasons, not understanding or choosing to ignore that a resurgence will take a week or more to show up in the figures by which time the number infected will have gone up by a factor of several and the casualty numbers will follow a couple of weeks later. Which will of course cause far more economic damage than otherwise, not to mention the other consequences mostly to other parts of society.

Much as I loathe Boris Johnson, I actually believe he's doing the right thing in relaxing the lockdown very gradually and checking for no uptick in the figures at each stage. But he is reliant on (and in many ways part of) a faction that goes on instinct and faith rather than facts (otherwise they wouldn't have supported Brexit). The current "lockdown not lockdown" advice is trying to throw a sop to that group while actually holding the line and stick with the consensus view amongst the scientists. He would be wise to allow regions set their own policies according to local circumstances, as suggested by several prominent figures outside the South East, and I think "Be Alert" is laying the ground for this.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

Scientists generally disagree with each other as much as politicians. This is a healthy academic trait. One would hope that the government has listened to a range of scientists’ opinions before making their decision.

I don’t doubt they did listen to a range
of opinions, but I feel too much weight was given to Ferguson/Imperial’s modelling. Such weight would be understandable *if* previous forecasts with Mad Cow Disease, Bird Flu and Swine Flu had proved even remotely close to the actual numbers who died; the margin of error, however, is truly staggering.
Let’s flip this around.
What if computer modelling at the time of swine flu had suggested to the government that fewer than 500 deaths would occur? And, based on that advice, they decided no new public health measures were needed.... and the numbers who died from swine flu were seen to rocket to 65,000?
Does anyone seriously think they would listen to advice from that same source ever again?
This article

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsand...over-respond-to-the-2009-threat-of-swine-flu/

on the fear of being seen under-reacting is interesting.

To conclude, most of us are ambiguity averse. We will think of the opportunity costs of not acting, and be influenced by a ‘what if’ effect. Erring on the side of caution in such cases feeds into a basic human need for security. However, at the policy making level, it ought to be recognized that in addition to the opportunity costs of not acting (e.g. the potential political costs, the possible loss of public confidence, the loss of life if the worst happens), there are opportunity costs of acting (e.g. provoking unnecessary fear, the repercussions from ‘crying wolf’, the lives and health lost by diverting resources away from other services) that should not be overlooked.

 

[lyndhurst25]

Personally, I don't like Ferguson. I think his actions during lockdown really showed his true colours - happy enough to force us under lockdown but not willing to accept it himself. And I think some of his past predictions have been wildly inaccurate.

But they won't have just relied on him, they'll have spoken to a range of scientists. He isn't the only one calling the shots, and I certainly wouldn't trust the likes of Vernon Coleman any more than him.

You can criticise Ferguson for breaking the lockdown. You can criticise him for errors in his scientific work. But the allegation that he broke the lockdown doesn't make his science any less valid than it was beforehand, despite the way certain newspapers have sought to spin it.

 

[edwin_m]

Such weight would be understandable *if* previous forecasts with Mad Cow Disease, Bird Flu and Swine Flu had proved even remotely close to the actual numbers who died; the margin of error, however, is truly staggering.

If no action had been taken about bird flu or swine flu, would the number of deaths have been as low as it was? How do you know that figure was an over-pessimistic prediction and not the result of a successful response? I seem to recall that the restrictions against these diseases were fairly light, certainly nowhere near those in place today, so would also have had much less economic cost and were therefore worth doing even if the worst case was considered very unlikely.

Mad cow disease is very different as was caused by ingestion of dangerous foodstuffs many years earlier, rather than from contagion in a traditional epidemic, so a model to predict that would also have little read-across to or from one for other diseases.

The story for Covid-19 is different - those countries that had an early lockdown managed to contain the disease at a low number and are now in a much better place than those like the UK that delayed. Consequently they will most likely end up with a shorter period of lockdown and less economic damage.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

If no action had been taken about bird flu or swine flu, would the number of deaths have been as low as it was? How do you know that figure was an over-pessimistic prediction and not the result of a successful response? I seem to recall that the restrictions against these diseases were fairly light, certainly nowhere near those in place today, so would also have had much less economic cost and were therefore worth doing even if the worst case was considered very unlikely.

Mad cow disease is very different as was caused by ingestion of dangerous foodstuffs many years earlier, rather than from contagion in a traditional epidemic, so a model to predict that would also have little read-across to or from one for other diseases.

The story for Covid-19 is different - those countries that had an early lockdown managed to contain the disease at a low number and are now in a much better place than those like the UK that delayed. Consequently they will most likely end up with a shorter period of lockdown and less economic damage.

Although I agree that Mad cow disease was not a virus as such, I rather think you’re missing the point.
Ferguson’s prediction about swine flu is particularly relevant to discussion about Coronavirus, because both are/were capable of being transmitted by person-to-person contact, by touching surfaces contaminated by an infected person, or by encountering expelled droplets produced when a person is coughing or sneezing.
What I find hard to fathom is this: we were told that if we could keep deaths from Covid19 below 30,000, that would be a ‘good outcome’ and that the lockdown was aimed at keeping numbers down.
Yet, despite Ferguson forecasting more than twice that number of deaths in the swine flu pandemic, the government did not embark on a lockdown! Why???
Did they think back then that his modelling was flawed, and lockdown would be an overreaction? If they did think that, why have they given so much credence to the prediction on Coronavirus deaths, given his poor track record?
Not initiating lockdown in 2009, if they truly believed in Ferguson’s work, would mean the government of the day viewed the deaths of up to 65,000 people ‘a good outcome’, which cannot be the case.
As we know, 457 people died, without any measures such as those currently in force being applied

 

[edwin_m]

Although I agree that Mad cow disease was not a virus as such, I rather think you’re missing the point.
Ferguson’s prediction about swine flu is particularly relevant to discussion about Coronavirus, because both are/were capable of being transmitted by person-to-person contact, by touching surfaces contaminated by an infected person, or by encountering expelled droplets produced when a person is coughing or sneezing.
What I find hard to fathom is this: we were told that if we could keep deaths from Covid19 below 30,000, that would be a ‘good outcome’ and that the lockdown was aimed at keeping numbers down.
Yet, despite Ferguson forecasting more than twice that number of deaths in the swine flu pandemic, the government did not embark on a lockdown! Why???
Did they think back then that his modelling was flawed, and lockdown would be an overreaction? If they did think that, why have they given so much credence to the prediction on Coronavirus deaths, given his poor track record?
Not initiating lockdown in 2009, if they truly believed in Ferguson’s work, would mean the government of the day viewed the deaths of up to 65,000 people ‘a good outcome’, which cannot be the case.
As we know, 457 people died, without any measures such as those currently in force being applied

That's an interesting point but probably can't be answered without detailed knowledge of what was advised and what actually happened. Do you know for certain what he advised? If there was knowledge at the time that swine flu was relatively less infectious or with lower mortality than Covid has since turned out to be, then maybe the advice might have been to impose something less severe. Or perhaps the advice would have been for a less stringent response to Covid, until it became clear how it was spreading elsewhere.

There are plenty of issues here about what was advised and what was done in response. But I don't think a quote from Vernon Coleman is a very helpful contribution.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

There are plenty of issues here about what was advised and what was done in response. But I don't think a quote from Vernon Coleman is a very helpful contribution.

Why, exactly?
As thinking adults, on a discussion forum, the notion that any opinions that differ from the ‘party line’ are unhelpful is frankly absurd.
I am a key worker and two of my colleagues have sadly passed away after testing positive for coronavirus.
(One was asthmatic, the other was overweight and had other health issues).
After seeing some of Coleman’s videos, I began reading other articles, encompassing a wider range of views of the issues around this health crisis.
One thing that struck me was a former consultant who warned against the use of ventilators and oxygen when inflammation of the lungs was involved. My late asthmatic colleague was, we were informed by our boss, recovering slowly. His family said he got dramatically worse after being put on a ventilator! It is everyone’s duty to read up and have a healthy degree of scepticism about the spoon-fed government medicine

 

[edwin_m]

Why, exactly?
As thinking adults, on a discussion forum, the notion that any opinions that differ from the ‘party line’ are unhelpful is frankly absurd.
I am a key worker and two of my colleagues have sadly passed away after testing positive for coronavirus.
(One was asthmatic, the other was overweight and had other health issues).
After seeing some of Coleman’s videos, I began reading other articles, encompassing a wider range of views of the issues around this health crisis.
One thing that struck me was a former consultant who warned against the use of ventilators and oxygen when inflammation of the lungs was involved. My late asthmatic colleague was, we were informed by our boss, recovering slowly. His family said he got dramatically worse after being put on a ventilator! It is everyone’s duty to read up and have a healthy degree of scepticism about the spoon-fed government medicine

But also about some of the theories that get put on the internet. Would you also believe Andrew Wakefield, who has a similar amount of medical background but has been censured and struck off for posting grossly misleading information?

There is information emerging about the appropriateness of ventilator useage, but one anecdote doesn't count as data. With families having little access to Covid patients, isn't it equally possible that the patient became dramatically worse (which seems to happen) and was very quickly put on a ventilator, and the family didn't get the full details of what happened in what order?

 

[Bayum]

The government and various other scientific groups had a multitude of other modelling strategies and predictions as well. Ferguson's could have been an outlier, in which case did the government, CMO and CSI go along with it as a worst case scenario? Or did other modelling strategies show a similarly higher value?

 

[JamesT]

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom there do appear to be some common threads with today, containment and contact tracing abandoned as unworkable and a discussion on the effectiveness of wearing masks. One notable difference is the availability of treatment and a vaccine so not just relying on the body's natural defences as we're doing with Covid-19. (My understanding is that ventilation is merely supporting the body rather than treating the virus itself).

 

[matacaster]

There is always a balancing act to be had.

Macro Level

Governments should make strategic decisions. Logic at this level might suggest
- the country (and world) is overpopulated and this trend is increasing quickly and remorselessly
- the medical profession, drug companies and care homes have a strong interest in keeping people alive and increasing longevity regardless of whether the people are complis mentis or indeed whether they want to be alive. This is exacerbated by caring offspring who place parents in care homes and dont always visit. The Government should allow people to choose to die and keeping people with
problems such as serious alzheimers should be kept out of pain, but allowed to die naturally rather than be saved at all costs. In an overpopulated world this desperate rush to save everyone is bonkers.
- If the economy is screwed, there will not be existing money for NHS let alone more
- The number of UK deaths from Covid is actually miniscule and many would likely have occurred anyway - It was madness not to quarantine people coming into Heathrow from January. This and the tube, buses and crowded offices and flats meant London got Covid first. The Londeners (or visitors to London) then largely caused the spread north.
- Potential Covid patients should have been put into the new Covid temporary hospitals and some existing hospitals temporarily redesignated to Covid only. Only allowed to leave when tested negative. Covid hospital staff effectively quarantined in designated covid only hotels (and paid a considerable extra amount for the inconvenience).
- No private jets still flitting about and people like that author who travelled 12,000 miles, ferguson and that scottish spokeswoman jailed
- Universities are places where people tend to play at computer programming, often writing pretty much unreadable code and suffer the consequences of poor practice which wouldn't be allowed in the commercial world.
- You can create money by quantitative easing an give more to the NHS, but the fact that you have effectively devalued the pound means that drugs etc from other countries will cost significantly more.
- Whilst you can (and should have had) more testing facilities in UK and more ability to produce drugs in UK, the inability to scale up testing and supply of drugs, PPE etc is because our manufacturing has been exported to China, India, Germany etc.

From a Micro perspective

- my family must live at all costs
- the NHS should get everything it needs (bear in mind you can always spend MUCH more to 'save' one life)
- Children and teachers must not die from Covid schools must be ABSOLUTELY safe. Laudable, but Covid risks of dying are possibly somewhat less than them getting run over on way to school.
- There should be no deaths on railways (ok, we'll make an exception for other people who we kill in our cars as that's somehow fairly acceptable?)


So, it depends on perspective. Individuals demanding treatment do not have to pay the costs of heart transplants etc, but individually we all do have to pay and there must be a sensible balance (the DFT work on about £30,000 per life I believe) between what is desirable and what is affordable. Sadly, emotion plays on the heartstrings too much at the micro level.