Ferguson Model is BS. Are All Models For COVID Like This?
Neil Ferguson — the guy who advised the UK Government, and recently was exposed in a quartine-breaking mistress scandal — wrote a model over the last 15 years that uses over 450 magic number parameters, and no ground truth controls. Its original source code is still unpublished, but a cleaned-up version was done by Microsoft engineers and published a few days ago.
https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim
It is full of bugs and cannot predict any where near the known results of any country, especially Sweden’s current numbers, without significantly overestimating. It is complete crap, and serves to show that Ferguson has been absolutely wrong on all past models of epidemics and pandemics.
I know scientists do not typically write production-ready software, but this one is way over the top! —especially given the real source code is unpublishable. It begs the question: Are all COVID models crap?
Here’s a Twitter thread that explains more: https://twitter.com/thatkatyagirl/status/1258431484018466817
#Covid19Models
Katya on Twitter
comments
Scientists talk about events that happened millions of years ago based on a few samples, with 1$ budget. They can run accurate simulations on the big bang, and write endless books about dark matter.
Meanwhile they can’t find how a virus spreads in present time with millions of samples and billions in budget. They can create TED talks about microscopic beings that existed in the ice age but can’t find a lost 300 ton plane that was connected to the internet.
Most “scientists” are full of sh*t.
Does an employer have the right to compel those people to put themselves at risk for additional revenue?
If you have an at risk person at home, you are going to have to find a new job. Luckily the government is fronting you the equivalent of $50K/year for a few months to do so.
There’s some value in having the right answer, even if the way you got there is hacky.
“All this wouldn't matter if it delivered reasonable results. However, no amount of fiddling with parameters deliver Swedish deaths of less than 90k. The model just consistently over counts infected and hence dead.”