The satirist Ambrose Bierce once defined prophecy as the \u201cart and practice of selling one\u2019s credibility for future delivery.\u201d\u00a0Covid-19 has produced no shortage of doomsaying prophets whose prognostications completely failed at future delivery,<\/strong>\u00a0and yet in the eyes of the scientific community their credibility remains peculiarly intact.<\/p>\n No greater example exists than the epidemiology modeling team at Imperial College-London (ICL), led by the physicist Neil Ferguson<\/strong>.\u00a0As I\u2019ve documented at length<\/a>, the ICL modelers played a direct and primary role in selling the concept of lockdowns to the world. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom explicitly credited\u00a0Ferguson\u2019s forecasts on March 16, 2020<\/a>\u00a0with the\u00a0decision to embrace the once-unthinkable response<\/a>\u00a0of ordering their populations to shelter in place.<\/p>\n Ferguson openly boasted of his team\u2019s role in these decisions\u00a0in a December 2020 interview<\/a>, and continues to implausibly claim credit for saving millions of lives\u00a0despite the deficit of empirical evidence<\/a>\u00a0that his policies delivered on their promises.<\/strong>\u00a0Quite the opposite \u2013 the\u00a0worst outcomes in terms of Covid deaths per capita<\/a>\u00a0are almost entirely in countries that leaned heavily on lockdowns and related nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in their unsuccessful bid to turn the pandemic\u2019s tide.<\/p>\n Assessed looking backward from the one-year mark,\u00a0ICL\u2019s modeling exercises performed disastrously<\/a>. They not only failed to accurately forecast the course of the pandemic in the US and UK \u2013 they also failed to anticipate Covid-19\u2019s course in almost every country in the world, irrespective of the policy responses taken.<\/p>\n Time and time again, the Ferguson team\u2019s models dramatically overstated the death toll of the disease,\u00a0posting the worst performance record of any major epidemiology model<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong>After a year, some of the ICL predictions reach farcical territory. Their forecast of 179,000 deaths in Taiwan, which never locked down, was off by 1,798,000% (as of this writing, Taiwan has just 12 Covid-19 deaths). A similar story played out in other countries that eschewed the lockdown approach for the first year of the pandemic. Imperial overstated the predicted mortality of Sweden (392%), South Korea (17,461%), and Japan (11,670%) in the absence of heavier-handed NPIs than any of these countries actually imposed.<\/p>\n But what about the rest of the world?\u00a0Most other countries experimented with some form of Neil Ferguson\u2019s prescriptive advice over the last year,<\/strong>\u00a0although for different degrees of severity and duration. Despite widely different mortality outcomes of their own, no other country provides anything approaching a clear validation of the ICL model.<\/p>\n The\u00a0searchable results<\/a>\u00a0above (please view on desktop or turn mobile to landscape and reload for best results<\/em>), compared to the actual death toll on March 26, 2021 \u2013 one year after the\u00a0original release of Imperial\u2019s international model<\/a>.<\/p>\n The table depicts three modeled scenarios that were published in\u00a0ICL\u2019s report from one year ago<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(ICL also included a fourth scenario attempting to approximate focused protection of elderly populations; however this approach was not meaningfully attempted in any country).<\/p>\n The first scenario shows an extreme \u201csuppression\u201d model,<\/strong>\u00a0triggered when a country reached 1.6 deaths per 100,000 residents. This strategy envisioned a stunning 75% overall \u201cuniform reduction in contact rates\u201d across the entire population. Even in the short term, this approach is akin to the harsh measures first implemented in the Wuhan region of China as distinct from the lesser lockdowns with \u201cessential business\u201d exemptions seen in most of the world. But ICL\u2019s suppression strategy also assumed that this measure \u201cwill need to be maintained in some manner until vaccines or effective treatments become available\u201d \u2013 basically a full year or more of uninterrupted lockdown.<\/p>\n No country on earth maintained a 75% suppression rate of all contacts for an entire year, making ICL\u2019s first model an extreme hypothetical of what a \u201cbest case\u201d aggressive policy response could attain rather than a predictive reflection of reality. Despite its hypothetical nature, ICL\u2019s suppression model still managed to overstate the number of Covid-19 deaths in all but the 20 worst-afflicted countries \u2013 none of which used anything close to the scenario\u2019s policy approach.<\/p>\n The second ICL strategy is closer to reality in most countries.<\/strong>\u00a0This \u201cmitigation\u201d model envisioned mandatory population-wide social distancing with a primary aim of preserving hospital capacity to treat the disease \u2013 a \u201cflattening of the curve\u201d as the popular slogan maintained. Using the most conservative replication rate that they modeled, R=2.4, Imperial\u2019s \u201cmitigation\u201d forecasts managed to dramatically overstate the number of deaths in every single country on earth. Using a higher R0 yields even more extreme overpredictions. But sticking with the 2.4 scenario is sufficient to show the systemic problem in the ICL model. Their \u201cmitigation\u201d numbers were too high by roughly 20-30% in hard-hit locations such as Peru, Mexico, and the Czech Republic \u2013 all countries that\u00a0used stringent lockdown measures at several points in the last year<\/a>. On the other extreme, ICL overstated the \u201cmitigation\u201d scenario\u2019s predicted death toll by 100,000% or more in a dozen countries. All but about 20 of the hardest-hit countries had \u201cmitigation\u201d forecasts that ran high by 100% or more.<\/p>\n The third ICL strategy projected the results of an \u201cunmitigated\u201d pandemic in which governments did nothing at all.<\/strong>\u00a0This is the scenario that famously predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States, 500,000 in the United Kingdom, and similar catastrophic outcomes across the world. Although Ferguson\u2019s team has a\u00a0bad habit of falsely claiming credit<\/a>\u00a0for saving millions of lives premised upon these apocalyptic numbers, the truth is they all amounted to wild exaggerations from a fundamentally flawed model. At the 1-year mark, no country on earth approached anywhere near ICL\u2019s \u201cunmitigated\u201d projections, and certainly not any of the countries that avoided heavy-handed lockdowns.<\/p>\n Although ICL did not release its full timeline of how the pandemic would play out under these scenarios, its modeling enterprise was built upon the assumption that the peak daily death toll for each country would hit approximately three months after the introduction of the virus. For most countries, that means a predicted peak sometime in the summer of 2020, with the overwhelming majority of forecast deaths to have occurred by the end of that wave.\u00a0A year later, most countries have not even remotely resembled the tolls predicted under most of the ICL model scenarios.<\/strong><\/p>\n Several questions remain.<\/p>\n Why is Ferguson, who has a long history of absurdly exaggerated modeling predictions, still viewed as a leading authority on pandemic forecasting?<\/strong> And why is the ICL team still advising governments around the world on how to deal with Covid-19 through its flawed modeling approach? In March 2020 ICL sold its credibility for future delivery. That future has arrived, and the results are not pretty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/s3\/files\/inline-images\/doomsday-800x508.jpg?itok=oETk9kZz\")
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