Day: 9 June 2020

Professor Ferguson unveils his latest model I've decided to post an update every day, but the updates proper will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with shorter ones on the other days. This is in response to numerous requests in the comment from people who find it difficult to keep track of the threads if there are over 1,000 comments, something that happens if more than 24 hours pass since the previous update. Friday's update, for instance, attracted 1,714 comments. Today, I've decided to devote the entirety of the update to Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, including a guest post by "Sue Denim", the software engineer who wrote "Code Review of Ferguson's Model" for Lockdown Sceptics on May 6th. That article was the most talked-about post that's appeared on this site, as well as the most viewed. This seems like a good time to publish Sue's latest thoughts about Professor Ferguson's model because yesterday the Imperial College modelling team, including Neil Ferguson, published a paper in Nature, based on a new model, arguing that the lockdowns have saved the lives of approximately 3.1 million people in 11 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). In the UK alone, the authors think the lockdown has saved 470,000 lives. That ...