Professor Pantsdown’s ‘Stay At Home’ lockdown advice based on badly written and unreliable computer code, experts say
THE coronavirus modelling credited with forcing the government to abandon its plans for "herd immunity" and put Britain into lockdown has been slammed as "totally unreliable" by a series of experts.
Leading figures claimed Professor Neil Ferguson's computer coding was something "you wouldn't stake your life on".
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Professor Ferguson leads the team at Imperial College London that handed a bombshell piece of research to the government that said failing to take drastic action could cause 510,000 deaths as a "reasonable worst case" and overwhelm the NHS.
It was a crushing blow to the government's initial hopes of defeating the virus by building "herd immunity" in the community.
But despite his support for the nationwide lockdown, Prof Ferguson failed to follow social distancing rules himself - and quit his government advisory role earlier this month after he twice met his married lover.
The Imperial model used code to simulate transport links, population size, social networks and healthcare provisions to predict how the deadly virus would spread.
However series of experts have now rubbished Professor Ferguson's modelling - after researchers released the code behind it.
David Richards, co-founder of tech firm WANdisco, told the Sunday Telegraph: "It's a buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.
"In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust."
Many have said is almost impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data, using the same code.
It is likely to reignite the debate as to whether the government should have taken into account a greater number of models before putting the UK in lockdown on March 23.
Michael Bonsall, Professor of Mathematical Biology at Oxford University, added: "We'd be up in arms if weather forecasting was based on a single set of results from a single model and missed taking that umbrella when it rained."
In the 2000s, Professor Ferguson's models incorrectly predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu.
Former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption has claimed the government put the country in lockdown in "blind panic" following Professor Ferguson's findings.
He wrote in the Sunday Times: "Quite apart from the fact that a worst case is by definition an unlikely one, few scientists now support this figure.
"But it has had disastrous consequences. It pushed the government into making a decision that mocks our humanity and treats us all as mere tools of government policy.
"The government terrified people into submission by giving the impression that Covid-19 was dangerous for everyone. It is not. It attacks people with serious vulnerabilities. The death rate for those under 50 is tiny."
The Bank of England has predicted the economy could take a year to return to normal, after facing its worse recession for more than 300 years.
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A spokesperson for the Imperial College COVID19 Response Team said: "The UK Government has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making. As has been repeatedly stated, decision-making around lockdown was based on a consensus view of the scientific evidence, including several modelling studies by different academic groups.
"Multiple groups using different models concluded that the pandemic would overwhelm the NHS and cause unacceptably high mortality in the absence of extreme social distancing measures.
"Within the Imperial research team we use several models of differing levels of complexity, all of which produce consistent results. We are working with a number of legitimate academic groups and technology companies to develop, test and further document the simulation code referred to. However, we reject the partisan reviews of a few clearly ideologically motivated commentators.
"Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus that Covid-19 is a highly transmissible virus with an infection fatality ratio exceeding 0.5pc in the UK."
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