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The Spectator has a page[1] showing the actual outcomes vs the models, and a worrying exchange[2] with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee. You c

The Spectator has a page[1] showing the actual outcomes vs the models, and a worrying exchange[2] with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee. You can judge for yourself. [1] https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios [2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-twitter-conversation-with-the-chairman-of-the-sage-covid-modelling-committee https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-twitter-conversation-...

maxehmookau 5y ago
The spectator has, however, had a strong anti-lockdown skew (I avoid the word bias.) since the start which is worth bearing in mind when viewing any statistics that they put out. Not saying that they're wrong, but their general libertarian-right stance is worth noting.
- brigandish 5y ago
  > Not saying that they're wrong Then I fail to see how the rest of what you wrote is relevant to what I posted. How is it relevant?
  - benjaminwootton 5y ago
    Especially when they simply post official data without commentary. The chart on the linked page "Covid hospitalisation vs Sage scenarios published 14 Sep 2021" is particularly damming. The modellers were calling our government all the names under the sun at the time of reopening, predicting almost certain doom. We then removed all restrictions and absolutely nothing happened. It seems like a UK phenomenon, but bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here. I'm glad we are finally asking the right questions.
    - maxehmookau 5y ago
      > bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here I would suggest that its probably the novel respiritory disease at the heart of the crisis here. Jokes aside, I don't see what the alternative is? If better modelling exists, we would've used it. The alternative was much worse.
      - brigandish 5y ago
        > The alternative was much worse. There are countries that didn't lock down like the UK - I live in one - and didn't fare as badly. What evidence do you have that the UK would've done worse if it had followed those examples?
        maxehmookau 5y ago
        It's an impossible comparison to make. The UK has a population that skews towards older folks, a chronically underfunded healthcare system and we moved to lockdown later than a lot of other western european countreis. A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down. I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions. Genuinely though, I would love to understand the idea that no lockdown in the UK could've done anything other than worsen the situation. We can argue forever about the type, length and timing of the lockdowns and their relative impact, but that's pointless because even the most well-informed were poorly informed in April 2020.
        brigandish 5y ago
        > It's an impossible comparison to make. And yet Nature published Comparing the responses of the UK, Sweden and Denmark to COVID-19 using counterfactual modelling in August[1]. It's not as if that's the only paper making comparisons, even if we only look in Nature. > A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down. I live in Japan, are you going to tell me it's a younger population? Or perhaps you'll make some claim about the healthcare system here based on… what I could not say as you have yet to give any indication of how your notions are backed, other than by political, tribal concerns. > I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions. As I've shown, one simple search should've turned up something, as I have a whole host of results. Biases should not go unchallenged, especially not through wilful ignorance. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9 Edit: formatting
zpeti 5y ago
To the sister thread maxehmookau: This is basically ad hominem. Dispute the numbers and the argument not the source. We can all point out how almost all other news stories somehow strongly skew towards clickbait and fear mongering and also seem to not be challenging government policy. I'm not sure why, let's not go into that. Does that matter in the debate?
mike_hearn 5y ago
The actual Twitter exchange is here: https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297 https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297 To summarize: Professor Medley, academic epidemiologist and chair of the official UK COVID modelling committee, states that SAGE only produces models that can be used to justify action, because in his view modelling scenarios that don't tell politicians to do things is pointless. "Decision makers are only interested in scenarios where decisions are made ... decision makers don't have to decide if nothing happens" He also asserts that government officials ask them for models to justify pre-chosen outcomes and they simply make them to order. The exchange is astonishing for how blunt it is, but not surprising to those of us who have been criticizing epidemiological modelling from the start. I've been writing continuously since the start of lockdowns that when read carefully, COVID modelling papers were continuously turning out to have unbelievable "errors" in them that invalidated their conclusions [1] [2] [3]. It quickly became apparent that many of these errors couldn't be genuine mistakes and motivated reasoning was the most obvious root cause, but these "scientists" constantly insisted that they were entirely neutral, politically independent and held themselves to only the highest standards. Professor Neil Ferguson even claimed his biggest regret about the pandemic was the extent to which other people had politicized it. Now we have a claim by the head of SPI-M itself that the modelling is not only entirely a product of political considerations, but that he thought it was obvious and can't understand why anyone else would be confused about this. Medley's comments make it untenable to believe that UK COVID modelling is scientific. Moreover his views speak volumes about the confusion and moral degeneracy that appears to exist inside the civil service/public health academia, something I've been worried about for a long time now. Read enough public health papers and you can't escape the conclusion there are very deep cultural problems in this field. This new event fits that impression completely - note that the Professor is confused and irritated by the exchange. He wasn't forced into the admission by clever questioning, he seems genuinely confused by the idea that not doing something is also a decision. In his world view it's obvious why SAGE didn't model a scenario in which Omicron is less severe than Delta despite the South African data, and he can't understand why Fraser Nelson (editor of the Spectator) is playing dumb as he sees it. This looks like near-total ideological corruption. Medley doesn't merely disagree with the idea of hands-off government, he doesn't appear to even recognize the concept exists at all. Nor does he recognize that there's a contradiction between presenting himself and his team as scientists whilst working backwards from pre-chosen conclusions to get a model that justifies them. Frankly though, I don't actually believe the government has been telling SAGE to create models justifying lockdowns. This is inconsistent with what we've seen so far, in which SAGE constantly runs to the press and kicks up a fuss any time the notionally conservative British government tries to relax restrictions. Additionally the LSHTM Omicron modelling paper itself doesn't say anything about equal severity scenarios being requested by the government. In fact it says they assumed omicron severity = delta severity due to "lack of data", which is transparently false. There's been data for weeks saying the opposite. Now even the head of the committee and senior LSHTM academic is disagreeing with their own claims about their severity assumptions. I think everyone in the UK who has trusted COVID modelling and "The Science" in the past 2 years needs to seriously reflect on what just happened, and what this exchange says about the state of our scientific institutions. Telling people the models are unreliable has felt like shouting into a gale force wind, for years. Maybe now the modellers themselves are saying the same thing, people will start to believe it. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 [2] https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-epidemiology-4cd14c7b81bd https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-... [3] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-paper-from-imperial-college-london/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...

maxehmookau 5y ago

The spectator has, however, had a strong anti-lockdown skew (I avoid the word bias.) since the start which is worth bearing in mind when viewing any statistics that they put out. Not saying that they're wrong, but their general libertarian-right stance is worth noting.

brigandish 5y ago
> Not saying that they're wrong Then I fail to see how the rest of what you wrote is relevant to what I posted. How is it relevant?
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Especially when they simply post official data without commentary. The chart on the linked page "Covid hospitalisation vs Sage scenarios published 14 Sep 2021" is particularly damming. The modellers were calling our government all the names under the sun at the time of reopening, predicting almost certain doom. We then removed all restrictions and absolutely nothing happened. It seems like a UK phenomenon, but bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here. I'm glad we are finally asking the right questions.
  - maxehmookau 5y ago
    > bad modelling has been at the heart of the crisis here I would suggest that its probably the novel respiritory disease at the heart of the crisis here. Jokes aside, I don't see what the alternative is? If better modelling exists, we would've used it. The alternative was much worse.
    - brigandish 5y ago
      > The alternative was much worse. There are countries that didn't lock down like the UK - I live in one - and didn't fare as badly. What evidence do you have that the UK would've done worse if it had followed those examples?
      - maxehmookau 5y ago
        It's an impossible comparison to make. The UK has a population that skews towards older folks, a chronically underfunded healthcare system and we moved to lockdown later than a lot of other western european countreis. A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down. I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions. Genuinely though, I would love to understand the idea that no lockdown in the UK could've done anything other than worsen the situation. We can argue forever about the type, length and timing of the lockdowns and their relative impact, but that's pointless because even the most well-informed were poorly informed in April 2020.
        brigandish 5y ago
        > It's an impossible comparison to make. And yet Nature published Comparing the responses of the UK, Sweden and Denmark to COVID-19 using counterfactual modelling in August[1]. It's not as if that's the only paper making comparisons, even if we only look in Nature. > A younger population, with a better healthcare system may have fared better if we didn't lock down. I live in Japan, are you going to tell me it's a younger population? Or perhaps you'll make some claim about the healthcare system here based on… what I could not say as you have yet to give any indication of how your notions are backed, other than by political, tribal concerns. > I'm not a scientist, so I can't show you specific papers to back up my assumptions. As I've shown, one simple search should've turned up something, as I have a whole host of results. Biases should not go unchallenged, especially not through wilful ignorance. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9 Edit: formatting

zpeti 5y ago

To the sister thread maxehmookau: This is basically ad hominem. Dispute the numbers and the argument not the source. We can all point out how almost all other news stories somehow strongly skew towards clickbait and fear mongering and also seem to not be challenging government policy. I'm not sure why, let's not go into that. Does that matter in the debate?

mike_hearn 5y ago

The actual Twitter exchange is here: https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297 https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297 To summarize: Professor Medley, academic epidemiologist and chair of the official UK COVID modelling committee, states that SAGE only produces models that can be used to justify action, because in his view modelling scenarios that don't tell politicians to do things is pointless. "Decision makers are only interested in scenarios where decisions are made ... decision makers don't have to decide if nothing happens" He also asserts that government officials ask them for models to justify pre-chosen outcomes and they simply make them to order. The exchange is astonishing for how blunt it is, but not surprising to those of us who have been criticizing epidemiological modelling from the start. I've been writing continuously since the start of lockdowns that when read carefully, COVID modelling papers were continuously turning out to have unbelievable "errors" in them that invalidated their conclusions [1] [2] [3]. It quickly became apparent that many of these errors couldn't be genuine mistakes and motivated reasoning was the most obvious root cause, but these "scientists" constantly insisted that they were entirely neutral, politically independent and held themselves to only the highest standards. Professor Neil Ferguson even claimed his biggest regret about the pandemic was the extent to which other people had politicized it. Now we have a claim by the head of SPI-M itself that the modelling is not only entirely a product of political considerations, but that he thought it was obvious and can't understand why anyone else would be confused about this. Medley's comments make it untenable to believe that UK COVID modelling is scientific. Moreover his views speak volumes about the confusion and moral degeneracy that appears to exist inside the civil service/public health academia, something I've been worried about for a long time now. Read enough public health papers and you can't escape the conclusion there are very deep cultural problems in this field. This new event fits that impression completely - note that the Professor is confused and irritated by the exchange. He wasn't forced into the admission by clever questioning, he seems genuinely confused by the idea that not doing something is also a decision. In his world view it's obvious why SAGE didn't model a scenario in which Omicron is less severe than Delta despite the South African data, and he can't understand why Fraser Nelson (editor of the Spectator) is playing dumb as he sees it. This looks like near-total ideological corruption. Medley doesn't merely disagree with the idea of hands-off government, he doesn't appear to even recognize the concept exists at all. Nor does he recognize that there's a contradiction between presenting himself and his team as scientists whilst working backwards from pre-chosen conclusions to get a model that justifies them. Frankly though, I don't actually believe the government has been telling SAGE to create models justifying lockdowns. This is inconsistent with what we've seen so far, in which SAGE constantly runs to the press and kicks up a fuss any time the notionally conservative British government tries to relax restrictions. Additionally the LSHTM Omicron modelling paper itself doesn't say anything about equal severity scenarios being requested by the government. In fact it says they assumed omicron severity = delta severity due to "lack of data", which is transparently false. There's been data for weeks saying the opposite. Now even the head of the committee and senior LSHTM academic is disagreeing with their own claims about their severity assumptions. I think everyone in the UK who has trusted COVID modelling and "The Science" in the past 2 years needs to seriously reflect on what just happened, and what this exchange says about the state of our scientific institutions. Telling people the models are unreliable has felt like shouting into a gale force wind, for years. Maybe now the modellers themselves are saying the same thing, people will start to believe it. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 [2] https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-epidemiology-4cd14c7b81bd https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-... [3] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-paper-from-imperial-college-london/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...