At the start of the alleged crisis was a bad model predicting millions of dead in the US alone. This was the start of the fear-hype hysteria that was propagated in the mainstream media. It was responsible for influencing many government across the world to initiate draconian measures.
This is the infamous Imperial College model led by Neil Ferguson. Or should I just call him Mr. Doomsday? The staggering figures predicted were 2.2 million dead in the US, and 500,000 dead in the UK if the respective governments did "nothing", i.e. imposed no measures.
In the UK, PM Boris Johnson was influenced by it, which led him to pivot 180 degrees and impose the lockdown nationwide. In the US, President Trump similarly pivoted and made recommendations for states as part of declaring a state of emergency.
This prediction-model was dead wrong though.
At first, Ferguson projected 500,00 dead if nothing was done in the UK, and 250,000 with lesser mitigation such as businesses remaining open. A full lockdown would produce 20,000 or less deaths. The NYT did a model of their own based on CDC data and said *"as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die" if no actions were taken.
Looking at Sweden, with lesser mitigation at most, that would have produced about 38,000 deaths by May. Is that what happened in Sweden, as they employed a lesser mitigation strategy? No.
This is what actually happened in Sweden, compared to the doomsday model predictions:
Not even close to the doomsday prediction, as the current Sweden COVID attributed deaths are at 3,800. That's 10 times less than the doomsday scenario.
These models are a joke. His code was initially kept closed source, hidden from peer review. No one confirmed his predictions, yet governments acted on it immediately.
Many modeling experts asked for the code to be open sourced, but Ferguson refused. That's odd. He didn't want peers to review his model. Why? Because it was trash, and he knew it. Read how he spun objections to the model and requests to oepn source the code:
I’m conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the pandemic simulation code we are using to model control measures against COVID-19. To explain the background - I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics...
I am happy to say that @Microsoft and @GitHub are working with @Imperial_JIDEA and @MRC_Outbreak to document, refactor and extend the code to allow others to use without the multiple days training it would currently require (and which we don’t have time to give)...
The code was for a flu model made in 2005 for Taiwan. Rather than open up the code for others in the field to review at that moment and help influence any actions governments were taking, Ferguson chose to go to Microsoft instead. Why? To re-write the code and make it better. So no one actually got to see the original bad code used to make a bad model that governments used to lock everyone down. Since when is Microsoft the experts to model epidemics? Fishy stuff.
Of all actions he could have taken, he went running to Microsoft, not other experts in field to properly model the pandemic. That's interesting. Why?
Could it be due to some loyalty or influence related to Microsoft? Maybe the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates?
The Gates Foundation funded Imperial College at various times. Look at the coincidence of the timing for the 29-fold (29x) increase in funding. In 2010, $2 million was given to Imperial College:
In March 2020, $79 million was provided to Imperial College:
Was this a 'thank you' kickback for helping push a fear-hype panic and helped to push the vaccine agenda Gates wants?
Ferguson's code was later released, with much modification by Microsoft. Yet, reviewers of the code still found it to be crap:
In a time where faith in scientific models is more important than ever, it's truly disheartening to see that such widely-used models are based on such faulty testing logic.
This is some of the worst code I have ever seen, there is no way of knowing what it is doing due to giant chunks of bad variable names and no tests. It is on par with some of the worse 1st year code I used to mark.
Ferguson was the one who suggested and pushed for various "measures" to be adopted by governments. And many listened. Social distancing and isolation are two measures he supported. But then it came out a few weeks ago that he was being a hypocrite and didn't comply with his own demands placed on the rest of the population. He was secretly meeting his mistress to have an affair. He then resigned from the UK government’s virus advisory board.
Surprisingly, The Telegraph even wrote that Ferguson's model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time.
The idiocy of it all is astounding though. Governments charted a course for society based on the model, which is the lockdown course. Then it turned out the course they charted was on an inverted map, and was going in the wrong direction. But the government didn't decide to correct their course given the model sent the min the wrong direction. No. The government just kept stubbornly going in the foolish direction. This is where we are at.
Neither the media nor the government have diverted from the affirmation that the course they have taken for weeks was the "right" one. Incredible, but that how it is. Get off the corona-phobia bandwagon people. It's bullshit.