Discredited Origin of COVID-19 ‘Lockdown’ Computer Models

Written by Graeme McMillan on May 7, 2020. Posted in Current News

In the last 20 years the world has seen the outbreak of many pathogens. Foot and Mouth in 2001, SARS in 2003, Bird Flue in 2005, Swine Flu in 2011, MERS in 2012, and Ebola and Zika in 2014.

Not forgetting CjD or as it is more commonly known, ‘mad cow’ disease. And now we have the new SARS-CoV-2 virus currently decimating the world’s population. Or perhaps not.

Professor ‘Lockdown’

It is the enigmatic Professor Neil Ferguson who has once again captured the world’s attention with mathematical models of the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and critically, how Governments should respond.

I have no doubts that Professor Neil Ferguson is an extremely clever man. After all, you don’t get to be an

“epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College, London.“ (Wikipedia)

He was also appointed the Order of the British Empire in 2002 for his ‘work’ in the mathematical modelling of the Foot and Mouth epidemic in the UK in 2001.

He is highly influential in all aspects of Health Policy. He is an advisor to the WHO, the European Union, and has had the ear of every UK Prime Minister since 2001.

“Governments around the world use Imperial research to underpin policy decisions, and their staff are among the world’s most influential scientists.” Business Insider

And yet, Prof. Ferguson remains an enigma. He has the unfortunate habit of making outrageous claims about the severity of new viral outbreaks throughout his career.

CjD Prof Ferguson 2001 –  136,000 deaths in coming decades

CjD Actual total 2015 – 226

To be fair to Prof. Ferguson he did adjust his figure to between 50 and 50,000. The technical term for that range is ‘covering your ass’.

H5N1 Prof. Ferguson 2005 200 million deaths

H5N1 Actual total – 455

In 2009 Prof. Ferguson was quoted as saying (regarding H1N1):

“This virus … is likely to spread around the world in the next six to nine months and when it does so it will affect about one-third of the world’s population,”

— lead author Neil Ferguson, from the UK-based Imperial College London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Prof. Ferguson first rose to prominence during the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK in 2001. He played a leading part of the Imperial College team that heavily influenced the policies of the Labour Government led by Tony Blair.

The paper by Kitching, Thrushfield and Taylor is a must read in understanding the carnage on British farms due to the misguided use of mathematical models.

Over 6.5 million animals were slaughtered (officially). Today, the herd numbers in the UK have not recovered to pre 2001 levels. Not to mention the social upheaval this caused to farmers whose herds were completely wiped out.

This was the first time mathematical modelling was used in favour of past experience to direct government policies during the outbreak of a highly contagious virus outbreak.

Some quotes which caught my eye from the above paper was:

“The models of Ferguson et al.(31, 32) and Keeling et al.(55, 56) addressed the spread of disease in a population of farms using ‘black box’ probabilities of infection, without attempting to model the actual mechanisms of disease spread (93). Central to the ‘black box’ approach is the ‘spatial kernel’, a probability construct that describes the probability of infection as a function of distance between infectious and susceptible farms. ……

The model that Ferguson et al.(31) presented to the Science Group in late March probably had the most influence on early policy decisions (93), specifically, the introduction of the pre-emptive contiguous culling policy. However, this model, and the Keeling et al. model (56) that was used to corroborate it, were assigned parameters that could not help but favour that policy, based on field tracing data that should have been viewed with caution…….

It is inevitable that modellers will seek to improve their models. However, they tend to focus their attention on tractable issues of ‘uncertainty’ (that is, focusing on influential parameters whose probabilities are not known).This is common to scientific research, which thus ignores parameters that are less amenable to investigation (61).The net result is that, as uncertainty is decreased,‘ignorance’ (essentially: not knowing what one does not know), which is a measure of the completeness and value of knowledge, increases (116). This apparent paradox therefore acts as a cautionary warning over the use of ever-more-detailed models as policy guides.”

The ‘black box’ and ‘spatial kernel’ modelling methods are crucial to understanding Professor Ferguson’s later work.

Professor Ferguson was appointed the OBE for his sterling efforts to exterminate millions of livestock based on faulty modelling. Tony Blair had his first taste of mass murder and went on to human experiments.

The origins of ‘Lockdown’

Questions have now started to be asked of Prof. Ferguson and his computer models. As a coder myself, I was astounded to learn that the his code was thousands of lines long, written in C and completely undocumented. Where have I heard this before?

Every programmer knows the importance of firstly documenting code and then managing version control and source code management. Github is probably the most widely used software for this purpose.

The fact that Prof. Ferguson’s undocumented and unreleased code code is being used to influence major Government policy decisions reminds me of another Mann’s code.

Prof. Ferguson’s Magnum Opus paper warning of 500,000 deaths in the UK can be found here:

Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand

Although the statistical methodology used is not detailed in this paper, the conclusions rely on data from the Wuhan outbreak to arrive at Case Fatality Rates, R-nought values etc. To be fair to the Prof., he did not actually do a U-turn on his 500,000 prediction. The 20,000 came from a scenario involving complete ‘lockdown’ policies.

The Table above shows Prof. Ferguson’s predictions based on various scenarios of R0.

The bases of these predictions were presumably taken from this paper:

Report 4: Severity of 2019-novel coronavirus (nCoV)

This paper does go into the statistical methods used. These can be complicated if you don’t know Bayes theorem. Even if you do and can work through them, the flaw is the paucity of data available to make good predictions. That didn’t seem to deter the good Professor.

As an aside, Bayes Theorem is a powerful tool to determine conditional probability. It is not a one shop mathematical formula. As new data becomes available, existing theories are updated. Here it is in all its glory.

The Original ‘Lockdown’ hypothesis

Prof. Ferguson cites that the model he used was the one developed in 2007 which simulated an influenza pandemic in the US based on a city the size of Chicago. This paper can be found here:

Modeling targeted layered containment of an influenza pandemic in the United States

To quote directly from the study:

Intervention Options

We considered a set of interventions consisting of antiviral treatment and household isolation of identified cases, prophylaxis and quarantine of their household contacts, closure of schools, social distancing in the workplace, and social distancing in the community at large.

Because these interventions are combinations of targeted and general interventions, we call them targeted-layered containment (TLC) approaches. We examined different levels of ascertainment of symptomatic influenza cases, compliance with the interventions, and cumulative illness attack rate thresholds for initiating interventions.

As early as 2007, the policies of school closure, liberal leave, workplace and community social distancing were being analysed. It makes interesting reading. But what is more interesting lies in the Supplementary Information here:

Modeling targeted layered containment of an influenza pandemic in the United States – Supporting Information

It is best to read this for yourself to get an idea of the amount of work which went into the seeding the initial model. Essentially a spatial model was constructed which tried to model areas of population, typical family sizes and generational makeup, distances to work and schools. One could say, an expanded model of the ‘spatial kernel’ used in the 2001 F&M outbreak which failed so miserably.

Presumably Prof. Ferguson had a data set of similar size and complexity for the UK. Access to data in 2020 is much simpler than in 2007 and computational power is far more advanced. What weights did the Professor assign to his ‘spatial kernel’ for this model?

However, Prof. Ferguson chose to use the same computer code to model SARS-CoV2, 13 years later based on limited data from Wuhan.

If you are interested in Mathematics at all, Grant Sanderson’s youtube channel, 3Blue1Brown, has some great videos on simulating an epidemic and also on Bayes theorem (image, above) and uses stunning visuals.

The COVID19 House Arrest

Only a few weeks ago none of us had heard of the term ‘social distancing’. It will now be the new ‘normal’. The fact is, these ideas are not new. In Prof. Ferguson’s 2007 paper it is stated that the work was carried out in conjunction with:

The intervention scenarios and baseline R0 values examined were selected in consultation with government employees working with the Homeland Security Council and the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States, and thus are particularly relevant for the U.S. pandemic plan.

One research group is a collaboration of investigators at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the Los Alamos National Laboratories (UW/LANL) (9, 11). One group is a collaboration of investigators at Imperial College and the University of Pittsburgh (Imperial/Pitt) (6). The third group is at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute of the Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University (VBI) (13, 14).

Although we, the unsuspecting public, had no idea that society as we know it was due to be cancelled, Governments had full knowledge of what they could do if required.

This article from The Guardian, although poorly written, gives an idea of the infighting and arse covering before the ‘lockdown’ but essentially points the finger of blame at Johnson. A case of a big boy did it and ran away. But yet again we see the influence of Prof. Ferguson who “responded extensively to questions from the Guardian for this article.”

Out of this melee came The Coronavirus Act 2020. It is a huge document passed in record time by the now defunct Westminster Parliament.

I would postulate that this Act was lying dormant on some Whitehall computer. A quick ‘find and replace’ on MS Word and we now have a new Act of Parliament.

On the 14^th of March an open letter to HM Government from 500 concerned ‘scientists’ was sent to Johnson advocating ‘social distancing’ measures NOW.

Judging by the first eight signatories, it would appear that this was organised by mathematicians from Queen Mary University of London. The first signatory is David Arrowsmith whose famous publications included Robustness of trans-European gas networks. Stranger and stranger.

On the 16^th March, Prof. Ferguson delivered his Magnum Opus to Johnson and the rest is history.

I have never met Professor Ferguson and cannot make any comment on his character. He may be a kind and considerate man whose only concern is the health of billions of people.

What strikes me is his meteoric rise to fame on the back of numerous failures. To compound this he seems to delight in the media attention his position and influence give him. And he does have tremendous power and influence on public health policies world-wide. To me he comes across as a man who is blinded by numbers and has little concern for the human (or animal) misery his ‘models’ facilitate.

Perhaps Kitching, Thrushfield and Taylor summed it up best when they said of the mathematical modelling of the F&M outbreak:

The numerical output of models has an air of intellectual superiority (noting that:

‘…mathematized theory in science is rarely so pellucid or so rigorous that its significance and bearing can be grasped immediately by distant readers’ [74]), while also seeming entirely appropriate in a society where numbers can ‘… reassure by appearing to extend control, precision and knowledge beyond their real limits… wrong numbers, one might add, are worst of all because all numbers pose as true’ (11).Numbers, therefore, may convey an illusion of certainty and security that is not warranted (43); for example, because of the use of whatever numerical data are available, regardless of their relevance and quality (38)’

About the author: Graeme McMillan graduated with Honours from Edinburgh University  (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) then gained further qualifications in Business Analysis, Project management, Statistics and Programming. He has had a long career in the UK mining industry in mine planning, geological modelling and computer systems management and programming. He then moved to the metals and minerals sector developing simulation modelling of materials handling (scrap, slag, semi-finished and finished products) as well as financial modelling of large mining and steel plant projects. Latterly, he ran his company’s Middle East and North African division. Graeme is now retired.

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