I think there are some really important points here, and one of the most shocking is that Imperial put out in their summary that optimal mitigation policies cou

I think there are some really important points here, and one of the most shocking is that Imperial put out in their summary that optimal mitigation policies could reduce deaths by half when their model just clearly doesn't model the base case. > The social distancing policies are being compared to a zombie alternative that cannot happen and will not happen. This is absoutely correct, my company made us work from home signficantly before the lock down because they were quite rightly worried about business continuity. In the Imperial model, that sort of thing just isn't accounted for. We literally cannot say whether the natural societal reaction would've reduced that base case by 1% or 99%. The second point I would make is that epidemics aren't different every time. Or rather, the underlying fundamentals of how diseases spread aren't that different every time. So how come, all of these institutions that are meant to be studying the spread of diseases are putting out papers based on hacked together research code from the 1980s? Like, what were you doing in the 17 years since SARS? Where are the dozens of open source, high quality, back tested, parameterizable models sitting on the shelf ready to go? In many ways putting out the results of some trashy model that you haven't even properly tested and trying to shape public policy with it is actually quite a damaging thing to do. Not only is it likely to lead to bad decision making, it's also going to destroy trust in institutions that desparately need to be trusted in these situations.