That was a good interview, and obviously he's very experienced, but I'm still concerned with a lot of things he said.
First of all, he claimed that the death rate was going to turn out to be 0.1%; but he didn't even give a hand-wavy answer for why he thinks that. Now obviously, he's a professional who's been studying epidemiology for decades, so his "gut feel" is actually worth something; but I'd feel a lot better about that if he at least gave some other evidence that corresponds to that.
Later in the show, when the interviewer asks him how many deaths he thinks the UK might have in total, he says "12,000"; and the interviewer says, "We've already had 13,000". I mean... dude, your model is obviously off by at least a factor of 2 or 3; what if it's a factor of 10?
He claimed that Korea was backtracking because they couldn't contain it; but looking at the numbers just today, they're still above 10,000, which is what they've been at for weeks now. (I think he may have gotten Korea confused with Japan, who do seem to be having hundreds of new cases on a regular basis.)
But, I mean -- he does have a point: suppose you get to the place where Korea and Taiwan are. Are you really going to keep the country hermetically sealed for the next 18 months while we wait for a vaccine? Are you really going to keep people under lockdown that long?
If you don't have a coherent plan to prevent sickness, but only to delay it, then this "controlled burn" approach -- where you try to let your country become infected as fast as your health capacity will safely allow -- is going to lead to exactly the same number of deaths in the end, but will reduce the economic and societal impact greatly.
>but I'd feel a lot better about that if he at least gave some other evidence that corresponds to that.
I can't speak for the man himself but recent evidence from California, the Netherlands and Germany (Heinsberg) suggests that the true number of infections may be underestimated by a factor of 20x-100x, which would drastically push down the fatality rate.
I read a blog analyzing the numbers out of California, which said that they'd made some pretty critical errors; namely, it wasn't clear what the false-positive rate of their test was, and that even a fairly small false-positive rate would put "0" within their error bars.
Germany is running nearly half a million tests per week now against a population of 83 million. I can believe that their true infection number is 2 or maybe even 3 times the official number, but I have a pretty hard time believing 20x.
People are grasping at straws. It's so horrendous to believe that the world will be struggling with the pandemic for 18-24 months that any plausible-sounding indication otherwise is taken as truth.
Been seeing it for three or four weeks already, ever since Elon Musk first quoted the hopeful-sounding but incorrect study stating that most of the UK had already had the disease.
The Heinsberg study specifically said they shouldn't extrapolate to the entire country since the epidemic there had some unique characteristics. E.g: they had an event which boosted spread a lot.
20x-100x underestimation seems like fairy-tale land. Even 3x underestimation is hard for me to believe, but 100x ??? That would mean 84M Americans have it, and that is _very_ hard to believe.
why is that hard to believe? It's clear that many (most) experience no symptoms, and if the size of the infected population doubles every ~3 days, well, you do the math...
First of all, he claimed that the death rate was going to turn out to be 0.1%; but he didn't even give a hand-wavy answer for why he thinks that. Now obviously, he's a professional who's been studying epidemiology for decades, so his "gut feel" is actually worth something; but I'd feel a lot better about that if he at least gave some other evidence that corresponds to that.
Later in the show, when the interviewer asks him how many deaths he thinks the UK might have in total, he says "12,000"; and the interviewer says, "We've already had 13,000". I mean... dude, your model is obviously off by at least a factor of 2 or 3; what if it's a factor of 10?
He claimed that Korea was backtracking because they couldn't contain it; but looking at the numbers just today, they're still above 10,000, which is what they've been at for weeks now. (I think he may have gotten Korea confused with Japan, who do seem to be having hundreds of new cases on a regular basis.)
But, I mean -- he does have a point: suppose you get to the place where Korea and Taiwan are. Are you really going to keep the country hermetically sealed for the next 18 months while we wait for a vaccine? Are you really going to keep people under lockdown that long?
If you don't have a coherent plan to prevent sickness, but only to delay it, then this "controlled burn" approach -- where you try to let your country become infected as fast as your health capacity will safely allow -- is going to lead to exactly the same number of deaths in the end, but will reduce the economic and societal impact greatly.