Modelling Insanity: The Sequel
19 December 2021 - 12:25 pm
I wrote about this obsession with ludicrously flawed and mathematically unfeasible computer models with their doom-mongering “scenarios” produced by highly financially and ideologically conflicted individuals like Neil Ferguson back in May 2021 and obviously that was not the first instance of nonsense computer models used as justification for tyranny.
The UK Government is doing it’s very best to drum up enough public support/fear to do it again via the latest scary named “variant”. The ironically named SAGE committee (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have both churned out some “scenarios” (SAGE) (LSHTM) that the public is intended to read as computer-modelled predictions that are accurate and should be taken notice of, both making the claim that more restrictions including more lockdowns are needed, and the media obliges with headlines like “Two-week Christmas lockdown looms – Boris set to thrust new rules on UK after SAGE plea” from the Express yesterday 18th December 2021.
The image we are supposed to conjure up in our minds is of freedom-loving stalwart Boris forced to relent to the begging SAGE who are simply “following the science” and are desperate to save lives. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, and should anyone be seriously entertaining the notion of another lockdown at this point as a reasonable or needed course of action, they need to ask themselves some serious questions based on the last 20 months and the documented evidence that now lies in the wake of this insane Government and globalist agenda.
Anyone with any basic mathematical and/or observational skills should know that Neil Ferguson and his modelling has been so thoroughly discredited and was so mind-blowingly wrong the only serious question one should ask each time this lockdown rule-breaking charlatan is wheeled out by the media who told you he’d resigned is, how has he still got a job? The answer is obviously that getting the model outputs correct is not his job. Scary numbers and graphs that are used by his paymasters to justify totalitarian policies and brutal psychological abuse of the populous, that is his job. He does that very well and has a very long history of it, hence his position is assured even when we’re told he resigned.
Ferguson is back of course, just when the Government needs some more fear instilled in the mostly double-jabbed public to take everything away again, like abusers do. Professor Ferguson obliges with the prediction headlined by the Daily Mail on the 17th December 2021 “Prof Lockdown Neil Ferguson warns of 5,000 Omicron deaths a DAY unless tighter restrictions return ‘in a week or two’ as London’s hospitalisations rise a third in a week, UK daily infections soar 60% to 93,000 and variant becomes dominant strain nationally”. Yes, that’s just the headline but you could be forgiven for thinking it was a paragraph from the article. The media knows people only read the headlines a vast proportion of the time, so why not cram the entire take-away narrative into the headline?
An interesting point is the headline has “5,000 Omicron deaths a DAY” but the URL has “7-000-Omicron-deaths-DAY” in it. Maybe the article headline was amended due to error, or even the Daily Mail thought 7,000 a day was over-egging things?
If you are bored or curious enough to look at the “Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK” dashboard our taxes have paid for on the Government website you can find the data that shows in the “second wave” during the winter of 2020/21 the number of reported cases correlates with the number of deaths within 28 days of a positive test for COVID-19. I am not for one second suggesting this correlation means anything as we know the tests are junk and there are other reasons for the excess mortality, but as the Government has the motive, means and opportunity to engineer those figures to correlate, lets take them at face value for the sake of argument.
The ONS (Office of National Statistics) say that the actual amount of “cases” is about double what is reported based on the idea that not everyone who allegedly has COVID-19 gets tested as their symptoms are so mild they don’t bother. Based on the reported “case” figures, and the reported “deaths within 28 days of a positive test” figures, the case fatality rate (CFR) is around 0.28%. Again these figures we know are as unreliable as a Government manifesto, but taking them at face value too, this works out to be about 1 death per 357 cases, with a two week lag, i.e. the death on average 14 days after the “case”.
The average rolling daily deaths as reported pretty much everywhere is about 120, and the cases per day 14 days ago was around 43,000. Taking those figures and assuming the new Omicron “variant” is equally as bad as Delta, we can calculate how many cases there would need to be to generate 5,000 deaths per day. There would need to be 1,700,000 new cases per day to meet the demand of 5,000 deaths per day. Ferguson’s modelling “scenario” has this happening by the end of January 2022.
If you factor in the reality that even if any of this was true, cases don’t jump from the 93,045 that was reported on the 17th December to 1.7 million overnight. We’ve heard the word “exponentially” used regularly by alarmist politicians and media to describe the rising number of cases. So taking that 1.7 million figure for the end of January 2022 and the required exponential increase from the number reported just two days ago, this would total 25 million new COVID-19 cases by January 31st. Seeing as there has only been 11.2 million cases in over 20 months, this computer model scenario supplied by Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London suggests more than double the cases in the next 6 weeks than the total number since the start of this whole thing back in early 2020.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, it’s because it is. Add to that, it would require over 50 million infected people all within that 6 weeks based on the ONS claim that the real number of cases is about double the reported positive test numbers. That’s about 74% of the population of the UK, all within 6 weeks when the prevalence (i.e. the percentage of people testing positive out of the population at any time) has rarely been close to 1% it just adds another layer of absurdity.
The LSHTM “scenarios” are the following…
Under the most optimistic scenario (low immune escape of Omicron and high effectiveness of boosters), a wave of infection is projected which could lead to a peak of over 2,000 daily hospital admissions, with 175,000 (95% CI: 139,000–198,000) hospitalisations and 24,700 (19,500–28,700) deaths between 1st December 2021 and 30th April 2022, if no additional control measures are implemented over and above the current ‘Plan B’ policy in England.
…and…
The most pessimistic scenario (high immune escape and lower effectiveness of boosters) projects a wave of infection which is likely to lead to a peak in hospital admissions around twice as high as the peak seen in January 2021, if no additional control measures are taken, with 492,000 (418,000–537,000) hospitalisations and 74,800 (63,500–82,900) deaths.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/modelling-potential-impact-omicron-england
They both sound pretty bad, although not quite as ludicrous as the SAGE/Ferguson modelling. There was an enlightening conversation on Twitter between Fraser Nelson (the editor of The Spectator) and Graham Medley who is a Professor at the LSHTM and also chairman of the SAGE modelling committee and so presumably had a hand in both of these modelling output reports. A reasonable question would be why have two submitted to the Government when the same people are involved in both of them, as it cannot be about independent verification.
Fraser Nelson has actually written an article about this exchange and the possibly unintended things it revealed. Here is the Twitter thread in question, and a link to it…
What that conversation reveals based on Medley’s responses is that these models that are allegedly to inform policy decisions are requested to output specific, very bad outcomes and no information as to the likelihood they can or will happen. That added to the mathematical farce of the SAGE/Ferguson model again shows how the Government is paying these people to give them the answers and (they believe) justifications they want to allow this authoritarian march over people’s lives, livelihoods and rights to continue. The public is led to believe by dishonest reporting and manipulative language that these models are outputting almost certain outcomes if we don’t agree to lock ourselves away again.
It is all complete garbage, created by bought and paid for anti-science practicing State lackeys and globalist organisation connected and funded charlatans. This is mathematically provable, on public record and now stated openly by people involved.