Hector Drummond

A new book comprehensively examines the scientific evidence on face masks for COVID-19 and finds even the most positive studies only found an effect of 15%, and the properly designed studies found much less than that.

by Hector Drummond Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson has drawn a lot of criticism recently for the poor state of the code in his COVID-19 model: "Code Review of Ferguson’s Model”"Second Analysis of Ferguson’s Model”"Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say expert""Neil Ferguson's Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”“A series of tubes” This criticism, it should be noted, is not even directed at his original code – which he still refuses to release, so we can guess how bad that is. The criticism concerns the completely rewritten code that has been worked on by teams from Microsoft and Github. However, Simon Anthony, sometime contributor to Hector Drummond Magazine, has recently written in the Critic magazine that the poor quality of Ferguson's code is beside the point. I actually agree with this claim. Of course, it is quite right that the poor quality of Ferguson’s code should have been drawn out into the open, and I think his critics should be congratulated for doing this. I also think it is revealing of the poor standards at work in general with Ferguson’s team. But, in the end, Anthony is right that the sort of modelling Ferguson is doing is not discredited by the fact that his own effort was so...