In an excellent article published last week in the FT, Jemima Kelly unravelled some of the claims and confusions, many of them coming from experts, supporting the idea that the corona virus is ‘simply a flu’ and that we should not taking it as seriously as European states (and most states in the East) are taking it.
One misleading claim was that Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson had drastically revised his models, and had even “admitted he was wrong”. On the contrary, Ferguson gave three scenarios, the first in which nothing was done at all, which his team estimated would result in 550,000 deaths, the second in which “mitigation” was used to slow the spread (about 250,000 deaths), the third aiming at total suppression (20,000 or fewer deaths).
Another controversial idea was from a paper, not yet peer-reviewed, from a team at Oxford university led by Professor Sunetra Gupta, published earlier this week and which earned some breathless headlines in the Daily Mail.
Gupta’s paper suggested the UK and Italy had probably already developed “significant levels of herd immunity”, and that as many as 68 per cent of the population could have contracted Covid-19, under the most extreme theoretical assumptions.
There has been a lot of pushback against these projections, which looked at only 15 days’ worth of data in both countries. Indeed a group of academics wrote to the FT, which published the findings of the report, that the paper’s findings had “no empirical justification” and that they had “major concerns” about the kind of sensationalist headlines it had generated.
Ferguson, by contrast, had been looking how the virus had spread in Italian villages, which were not consistent with the Oxford paper’s projections . “We’re nowhere near Gupta’s scenario in terms of the extent of infection”, he told the UK’s parliamentary select committee on science and technology.
For reference, here is an article on 12 experts who question the seriousness of the epidemic. John Ioannidis (Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine) mentions the puzzle of the Diamond Princess statistics, which Eumaeus discussed a while back, and which suggests the fatality rate is not as high as the worst estimates of 3-4%. But on a cautionary note, this article on the Italian experience suggests that we should be worried.
Eumaeus is staying at home with his dogs, and avoiding strangers (picture above).