There’s a man who has great responsibility for the primary global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. His name is Neil Ferguson.
British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, Dr. Ferguson has an impressive resume. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was awarded the Order of the British Empire. His specialty is the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals.
We quoted Dr. Ferguson in our editorial of January 24, 2020, China’s Health Problem Is Our Problem. “Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiology expert at Imperial College London [ICL], said the new strain is currently “as deadly as the Spanish flu epidemic”. As head of the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team, his team’s publication in mid-March 2020 projected that the UK could face hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19 without strict social distancing. He calculated that with ‘strict social distancing, testing and isolation of infected cases,’ deaths in the UK could fall to less than 20,000.” The current UK death toll is 127,603.
In 2005, Neil Ferguson said that bird flu could kill as many as 200 million people worldwide. Between 2003 and 2014, the actual global death toll was 455. Ferguson and his group have been involved in modeling the impact of infectious disease outbreaks and work, as is reasonable, on a “worst-case scenario.” Further, the recommendations are always framed by “if we don’t do this.” In most instances, particularly for localized epidemics, the recommended strategies are “lockdowns” and isolation to contain the outbreaks.
In early May 2020, Ferguson resigned from his role as Covid advisor to the UK government. During the last week of March 2020, his married girlfriend visited his home on at least two occasions, violating the UK quarantine protocols.
The ICL creates models based on the best information possible and then makes conclusions, which is not an easy business. The governments of the US and UK explicitly credited Ferguson’s forecasts on March 16, 2020 with the decision ordering their populations to stay home. Ferguson boasted of his team’s role in these decisions in a December 2020 interview.
But how accurate were the models?
In Taiwan, which closed borders but never locked down, the death count is 12. ICL predicted 179,000 deaths in Taiwan. The ICL model for the Philippines assuming “contact reduction [lockdown or ECQ] maintained until vaccine” was 174,749. With nationwide “Social Distancing” the Philippines would have 229,877, and with no measures, 368,084 would die.
As early as the first week of March 2020, we knew exactly what to do: stop “super-spreader” situations. “The number of coronavirus cases in South Korea has soared to about 602, according to The New York Times. More than half of those cases involve members of, or those somehow linked to, the religious sect, the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, where a so-called super-spreader infected at least 37 people last week.”
It was not going to a shopping mall that counted. It was being packed closely together with dozens, sometimes millions of people. Deutsche Welle: “One event, the Kumbh Mela [early April] religious festival in the northern city of Haridwar, has already attracted nearly 5 million largely non-mask wearing Hindu pilgrims to the banks of the holy Ganges River this week.”
Nepal reported 9,070 new confirmed cases last Thursday, compared with 298 a month ago. Some 50,000 Nepalese attended the Kumbh Mela.
If you look at the ICL statements, they were sane and reasonable one year ago. But we know more now and as such, the pandemic response should have changed. That’s the problem, not the models.