Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday.
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve.
However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson has changed his tune, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured. Now, the epidemiologist predicts, hospitals will be just fine taking on COVID-19 patients and estimates 20,000 or far fewer people will die from the virus itself from from its agitation of other ailments.
Ferguson thus dropped his prediction from 500,000 dead to 20,000.
Author and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson broke down the bombshell report via Twitter on Thursday morning (view Twitter thread below).
“This is a remarkable turn from Neil Ferguson, who led the [Imperial College] authors who warned of 500,000 UK deaths — and who has now himself tested positive for #COVID,” started Berenson.
“He now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. — more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case [because] they were so old and sick,” he wrote.
To put this number in context, there are usually thousands of deaths from the flu each year in the U.K. Here is some information from the University of Oxford on deaths ranging from 600-13,000 per year:
Influenza (flu) is a very common, highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It can be very dangerous, causing serious complications and death, especially for people in risk groups. In rare cases flu can kill people who are otherwise healthy. In the UK it is estimated that an average of 600 people a year die from complications of flu. In some years it is estimated that this can rise to over 10,000 deaths (see for example this UK study from 2013, which estimated over 13,000 deaths resulting from flu in 2008-09). Flu leads to hundreds of thousands of GP visits and tens of thousands of hospital stays a year.
Berenson continued: “Essentially, what has happened is that estimates of the viruses transmissibility have increased — which implies that many more people have already gotten it than we realize — which in turn implies it is less dangerous.”
“Ferguson now predicts that the epidemic in the U.K. will peak and subside within ‘two to three weeks’ — last week’s paper said 18+ months of quarantine would be necessary,” the former reporter highlighted.
“One last point here: Ferguson gives the lockdown credit, which is *interesting* — the UK only began [its] lockdown 2 days ago, and the theory is that lockdowns take 2 weeks or more to work,” stressed Berenson. “Not surprisingly, this testimony has received no attention in the US — I found it only in UK papers. Team Apocalypse is not interested.”
Because that’s what socialized medicine does; they get rid of the old and sick to take care of those of more value to “society”. That was Cuomo’s plan when he bought solar panels instead of ventilators.
Fear and panic is the ally of the left. Of course, fear of this virus might have kept some indoors.
Actually, Neil Ferguson’s initial projection was a calculation of what would happen in the absence of lockdown measures. His current calculation predicts the outcome with the lockdown measures the UK has just adopted in place. The UK government was very slow to react. Boris Johnson only got his act together on March 23.
From Imperial College London, March 26, 2020 – J-IDEA’s Neil Ferguson tells MPs lockdown can help NHS manage coronavirus
Coronavirus cases in California and New York are doubling every three to four days.
@Greg: NY and California did lock down, though mostly voluntary. It’s just that those people didn’t initially care to take it seriously.
The media knew this but uses the calculation to drive fear, these facts have been already reported if you dont get your lies from cable tv talking heads. Possibly the Obama H1N1 swine handling model. Not a real Presidents way of handling a pandemic
@Greg:
Maybe if they obeyed the rules layed out by the President the spread would be less, or they have all the tests they screeched for thus the cases are just verified.
@kitt: It’s the liberal instinct to do the opposite of whatever Trump says. If it weren’t for these dumbasses infecting random, innocent people, I’d say this is a great way to thin the herd. For instance, I wonder how many the filth-merchant Kathy Griffin has infected before she entertained us all her misery?
The possibility that really large numbers of people have already been ‘”infected” with the COVID-18 virus without consequence raises several questions, not the least of which is whether or not they have developed an immunity to the virus. If so, those large numbers of the population, IF IDENTIFIED, could form the foundation of the economy’s recovery. There would have to be a diagnostic means of determining that status to confirm both the validity of the theory and the safety of sending the potentially immune back to work, and at this point no such test exists.
If true, it would also mean that, as the author suggests, the virus’ progress through the population is further along than originally thought. However, the fact that the New York numbers continue to grow exponentially suggests that perhaps the theory is wrong. Why else would New York’s numbers continue to grow rapidly if such a large fraction of the population had already been infected to no effect?
We seek to minimize the deadly consequence of this pandemic at our own peril. One has to wonder why.