from Hacker News

Epidemiologist behind Imperial College coronavirus model revises model

by r6203 on 3/26/20, 6:50 PM with 78 comments

  • by martingoodson on 3/26/20, 8:19 PM

    This is misinformation. This is not a major revision in any sense. Read the Imperial College paper. The estimates were different between the 'mitigation' and 'supression' strategy. The UK have now changed strategy to 'supression'. Hence the different prediction.

  • by nicois on 3/26/20, 8:28 PM

    They claim half the population is already infected. So conduct a random sample, test 50 people and you would expect 25ish MTO be positive, with most showing no symptoms. If so, then herd immunity is indeed a thing.

    I have my doubts that the numbers would support this claim. And if so, then virtually everyone in Spain or Italy would already be a carrier.

    The fact that cases were linked to known arrivals also is evidence against this hypothesis : if a high proportion of carriers were unwitting and asymptomatic you would expect many of those diagnosed to not have a link to someone previously diagnosed.

  • by jtbayly on 3/26/20, 7:50 PM

    I'd really like to see this discussed here. I've not seen anybody talking about this in the US. This is the guy behind the "highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model."

    And this is a major revision. It drops estimated deaths in the UK from 500,000 to "20,000 or far fewer." It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.

    The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up, which implies that many more people have already had the virus than we realized. This, in turn, means that a much lower percentage are serious cases. It also means that we are much nearer to the peak than we thought.

    Edited to add: He also credits the lockdown in the UK, but if you look at the previous model of how this plays out even with a complete lockdown, you see that the vast majority of the change must come from the change in estimate of transmissibility.

  • by dr_faustus on 3/26/20, 8:31 PM

    The theory that the virus has been spreading for months just makes no sense at all. By all accounts, COVID has a pretty quick progression and serious cases need to be hospitalized after about one week of symptoms or about two weeks after contraction. How come that the virus has infected millions and millions of people in the last months but none of them got seriously sick. And now all of a sudden, 1000s are dying. Unfortunatly, it seems that even researchers from reputable institutions are now just pulling numbers from their asses to grab some headlines.

  • by triceratops on 3/26/20, 8:17 PM

    "He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower."[1]

    So basically "Scientist revises model based on new conditions". Isn't that supposed to happen?

    A successful prevention is going to feel like failure. It's going to prompt questions like "was this worth all the panic, and tanking the economy?" Bodies are easy to count, deaths prevented are invisible.

    1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...

  • by nicois on 3/26/20, 8:30 PM

    I also believe the referenced article does not correctly convey what the original New Scientist article does: the original epidemiologist does not buy in completely to the new inferences, by my reading.

  • by sunnyP on 3/27/20, 12:08 AM

  • by guscost on 3/26/20, 8:17 PM

    Another model that fits the UK data, even when assuming that half of the population has already been infected, which would mean that the disease is not nearly as dangerous as commonly thought: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/oxford-study-coronav...

    By adjusting those two parameters (R0 and IFR) in opposite directions, you can come up with a whole gamut of scenarios that match the evidence pretty well.

  • by imeron on 3/26/20, 8:21 PM

    Bill Gates on the Imperial College model: 'Fortunately it appears the parameters used in that model were too negative. ... Models are only as good as the assumptions put into them' https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill...

  • by sathomasga on 3/27/20, 12:26 AM

    This is flat out wrong. There is no revision at all. To quote [Neil Ferguson himself](https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928):

    I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19

    This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.

    My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place.

    Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).

  • by tandr on 3/26/20, 11:24 PM

    Made me thinking - Is this the reason behind today's market's rally close to the end of the day?

  • by sunkenvicar on 3/26/20, 8:15 PM

    I hope he’s right.

  • by wbronitsky on 3/26/20, 8:18 PM

    So we are normalizing rightwing propaganda sites on HN now? Seeing an article from a Ben Shapiro fronted site on the HN front page is frightening. I need a new place to get my information.