Another Computer Simulation, Another Alarmist Prediction
by Sue Denim A Covid-safe classroom There's a new paper out in the Lancet called "Determining the optimal strategy for re-opening schools" by Panovska-Griffiths et al. It predicts a large wave of infections and deaths if there isn't a big step up in contact tracing and isolation (house arrests) of PCR-positive cases. The model has been getting traction in the media, like in this segment by Sky News: "it's just a model but clearly, that would be disastrous". Unfortunately, people are being misled once again. The modelling conclusions are unsupportable. The papers. There are two papers we'll be looking at. One is the UK specific instantiation of the model looking at school re-openings (henceforth "the schools paper"), and the second describes the Covasim simulation program that was used to calculate the results (henceforth "the Covasim paper"). Both papers come from substantially the same team. The model. The schools paper says the "approach is similar to that in the study by Ferguson and colleagues, which informed the implementation of lockdown measures in the U.K.". Covasim is a simulation structurally quite similar to the COVID-Sim program by Imperial College London we have previously looked at in part one, two and three of this series. It simulates individuals in a population as they pseudo-randomly get sick, infect contacts and sometimes die. Indeed, Covasim is so similar to COVID-Sim that a quick perusal of the...