Coronavirus (2022) thread

[meltonblue]

I hope all you supporters of SAGE are happy with the impending financial doom that's approaching. Part of this is the cost of not coming out of lockdown 8 months ago when we could have done if it wasn't for SAGE advising the government not to open things up. Now it's payback time, enjoy.

Think this is the point that it goes over the threshold of being an argument more for the political thread than this one, as much as there’s muddied waters between the two…

 

[Churchlawtonblue]

The LHTSE most optimistic model was just over 2000 admissions and that was at the time when they were still making an assumption that Omicron would be as severe as Delta so that’s just factually wrong. If you consider the forecast modelling they considered from Denmark too that has been discussed already, that was pretty bang on.

They don’t model all scenarios for projections though, that’s wrong to suggest that too. They model scenarios to try and show where further intervention may be required, there’s not much point in ones that don’t. It did what it needed to with Omicron in terms of speeding up the booster vaccine rollout (without that, then the admissions would have been higher than their best case scenario) and also because we learned very quickly that omicron was less severe than delta and that behaviours had significantly changed anyway (which I do think they need to factor more in, but they’ve said the same too), we knew that the actual would be lower fairly quickly in the cycle, it never hit the trigger points.

They assumed omicron was as severe as delta despite the data from SA indicating it wasn't, they considered this data then dismissed it as not applicable to the UK. That was where they went wrong. Either way it was a mistake.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

lol the literal meaning of a model is a guess you clown.

Incorrect.

Predictive models, such as those employed in weather forecasting or in projecting health outcomes of disease epidemics, generally are based on knowledge and data of phenomena from the past and rely on mathematical analyses of this information to forecast future, hypothetical occurrences of similar phenomena.

Calling models a guess is like saying a calculators guess the sums we put into them.

A guess is the opposite. A guess estimates something where there is a lack of sufficient information to formulate a calculation.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

I hope all you supporters of SAGE are happy with the impending financial doom that's approaching. Part of this is the cost of not coming out of lockdown 8 months ago when we could have done if it wasn't for SAGE advising the government not to open things up. Now it's payback time, enjoy.

Impending financial doom? The economy is up 7.5% in the last year, back to levels just 2% below where they were before the pandemic started. We are currently experiencing the fastest economic growth we’ve had since the end of World War 2.

We’ve never been in a lockdown at any point during the pandemic, and the more strict restrictions that were coined a “lockdown” ended 11 months ago (almost 12, as it was 5th March 2021).

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Their best case model for omicron was for between 3000 to 10000 hospitalizations in England alone daily. The other two scenarios they did for omicron resulted in much higher numbers. We actually reached a peak of just over 2000 admissions. How can you say they modelled all scenarios, when the actual data falls well below their best case?

Read the report and take the words as their actual meaning rather than your personal interpretation.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Either way it was a mistake.

No, they said that there was insufficient data on severity to allow assessment of how much of the observed difference was down to immunity, and how much to the intrinsic prooerties of the virus.

This was also the view of many SA based scientists at the time, a number of whom I've quoted in this thread.

The projections were presented in that context.

 

[BerkshireBlue]

Incorrect.

Predictive models, such as those employed in weather forecasting or in projecting health outcomes of disease epidemics, generally are based on knowledge and data of phenomena from the past and rely on mathematical analyses of this information to forecast future, hypothetical occurrences of similar phenomena.

Calling models a guess is like saying a calculators guess the sums we put into them.

A guess is the opposite. A guess estimates something where there is a lack of sufficient information to formulate a calculation.

Mare I build predictive models as my full time job I know exactly what they are. They are guesses.

 

[Invisible Man's Bandage]

The clear winner of The Covid Doomsday Award goes to The Guardian:

The main headline just before Christmas was 'Scientists Predict 6000 Covid Deaths Daily'. The article went on to refer to this number of deaths each day with no detail as to how it was arrived at and no caveats about why this might not actually be the outcome.

What that actually referred to was a model produced by UCL in which the worst predicted outcome was that (the model itself was ridiculously pessimistic). I assume that worst case scenario was based on Omicron being far more transmissible than Delta (which it is of course), being as severe or worse (which it isn't), vaccines providing no protection whatsoever (they are very effective) and hospitals being completely overwhelmed, with carts rumbling through the streets picking up the dead as with the Black Death.

A lot of this is blatantly political so truth and objectivity goes out of the window.

 

[SWP's back]

The modellers can say they aren't predictions until they're blue in the face but when they're used by their bosses (Whitty and Vallance) to lobby the government into shutting down society they take on exactly that role.

Yeah it’s a bit weird that a couple of people aren’t understanding that.

 

[SWP's back]

Which scenario do you think any government should work on?

Best case,
Worst case or
Average of the two case?

If the worst case scenario isn’t prepared for, then millions of people could have died.

Now the worst case scenario hasn‘t happened, we have lots of Dr Hindsights with degrees in epidemiology from Facebook university calling the modellers out.

That’s bollocks. Both “best” and “worst case” scenarios used case fatality rates from Delta for Omicron despite RSA data showing that to massively overestimate the lethality of omicron.

There is no Dr Hindsight needed, about a dozen of us were pointing that out in November and arguing that lockdowns were pointless and unneeded for omicron with a highly vaccinated population.