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Widely-Cited US Coronavirus Projection Drops from 2M Deaths to 84,000
Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson.
Imperial College London made headlines on March 17 for their apocalyptic projection of Coronavirus deaths worldwide. Their lead researcher, Neil Ferguson, claimed that 250,000 citizens of the UK would die from COVID-19. On Thursday, he dramatically reduced it to less than a tenth that number.
Ferguson now claims that UK deaths “could be substantially lower” than 20,000. He adds that two-thirds of these victims would have died in the next six months anyway due to underlying health conditions.
The original study has been repeated endlessly on cable news, adding to the sense of panic among hosts and many in their audience. Nine days ago, Imperial College London claimed that the US would lose up to 2 million Americans. Their new numbers? Just 84,000, again with two-thirds predicted to die within the next six months without Coronavirus.
Imperial’s latest projection would still be considered a major public health problem, but it contains a staggering drop from the worst-case scenario by a factor of 25. Using 2017 figures, 84,000 lost would place Coronavirus as the seventh leading cause of US deaths, tied with diabetes, and far below heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, respiratory disease, stroke, or Alzheimer’s disease.
You can view all the new numbers via Excel file at this link.
Published in General
Ferguson is about to be canceled.
Listen to the experts, they said. They know what they’re talking about. Rrrright.
He’ll always have a job with MSNBC.
I just started listening to National Review’s The Editors podcast, and it’s like they have not even heard this news, which has been covered in the Daily Wire podcasts, and Powerline.
It sounds to me that Trump’s prediction of things easing up by Easter is looking more and more realistic.
There are areas that should probably have restrictions, like New York City, maybe New Orleans, and maybe areas of California.
Since these lock downs have been initiated by state and local governments, they can make their own decisions when to lift them.
Now the questions start, and will grow. The part of the medical community that scared the hell out of us and caused us to panic, will get a big black eye over this. And that includes the CDC and the FDA. In the case of the CDC, they generally had a good reputation and that’s been trashed.
And Trump? He made some missteps, the usual Trump being Trump, but he will come out of this looking better than he has.
Dr. Ferguson says his statements have been misunderstood. (The link is to a Twitter thread.)
The “experts” are appearing to be about as good at predicting in epidemiology as they are in politics.
Hey! I’ve been running my own basic projections.
Today’s numbers came back with 363k worldwide and 75k in the US.
Interesting that my numbers came back similar to these.
At this time point, and from this location (NYC), I only see the “good news” side of this. I want to see all projections scaled way, way down when they meet reality.
And if we are more aggressive with drug treatments, I might just win my bet with @Kozak…
Kozak estimates eleventy billion die, right?
Of course all those extra people living and exhaling will exacerbate the CO2 levels, reducing that 12 year window down to couple months, tops!
No, a COVID Scientist Didn’t Walk Back His Prediction
Even so, I think this whole thing has been way overblown. The most dire predictions are going to turn out to be at least 10 times worse than reality.
Thank you so much for posting this data.
I’d heard about this yesterday and again today on the Ben Shapiro podcast, and have been looking for coverage of it ever since.
I was happy to hear Dr. Birx reference this today during the White House briefing. It’s absolutely critical to have accurate data that helps to identify true trends and to develop reasonable projections, especially when you’re trying to run a country! My hope and prayer is for vast improvements in the quantity and quality of the data being reported so that better decisions can be made for immediate needs, and strategies prepared for the path forward.
Are Indians (from India) just better at math and statistical modeling?
Well, with a 2400% margin of error . . .
What I hate most about situations like this is all the finger pointing and I told you so ism. Mistakes will happen. Including, false reports about “walkbacks” in predictions that actually did not happen. And what sane person expects anyone to get everything right given the paucity of data? We don’t have enough test kits to “waste” on random sampling to get better data.
I hate the progressive idea that experts should govern as much as the next man, but this kerfuffle is hardly an example of that. To me, using the differing models and conclusions to imply that we can’t trust scientists is as frivolous as trying to use the situation to ban gun sales…or abortions for that matter. We are at war.
From your lips to God’s ears.
There are already articles surfacing from Stanford, Oxford and other sources that indicate that the initial projections were too extreme. The Ricochet Video Podcast tomorrow morning should prove most interesting. The methodology for the exaggerated claims – if that’s what they turn out to be – will be dissected and scrutinized to see where the earlier projections went wrong.
It’s not as though there hasn’t been a precursor to this potentially flawed methodology given the alarmist predictions of the dire effects of Anthropogenic Global Warming which were based on garbage-in (or deliberately skewed data fed into computer models) to project apocalyptic scenarios…that never happened in the time frames originally claimed — and have now been pushed back to over 1,000 years.
Yes, there is still extreme risk and possible death to certain health-compromised groups – especially people my age and older whose immune systems may not be as resilient as they once were (I’m pretty healthy by the way – thanks for asking) or those who have other serious medical conditions. But if the death rate projections are corrected downward, then a lot of the hysteria and panic should hopefully diminish, especially if the availability of certain drugs – like hydroxychloroquine and ventilators become readily available for the more at-risk demographic.
It is healthy for everyone when scientists argue with other scientists and challenge their findings.
Jon, thanks for the info, but the Excel file doesn’t seem to show the figure that you cite.
It has two relevant pages, “Mitigation” and “Suppression.” The “Mitigation” page shows US death tolls ranging from 729,256 to 2,780,065. The “Suppression” page shows US death tolls ranging from 84,124 to 2,654,410.
I’m very confused about the reporting on this or maybe how the authors initially presented it. I finally got around to reading the paper. It includes an analysis based upon scenarios varying from “do nothing” to 4 different types of interventions. The scenarios also take into account different points in the disease spread when the interventions are undertaken and the different possible Ro (transmission) factors for the virus.
The paper concludes that if the UK did nothing there would be between 410,000 to 550,000 fatalities but if it took the most stringest group of interventions (school closure/social distancing/home quarantine/case isolation) the fatalities drop to a range of 5,600 to 48,000.
As I read it, nothing has changed except people have noticed how the full analysis works.
Here’s the link to the paper. The numbers I cite come from the table on page 13.
Nothing wrong with disagreements. The Oxford Professor said she was surprised at how uncritically the Imperial College model was adopted, though she supports the move from mitigation to suppression in Britain. And as a friend of mine pointed out about the work of Stanford doctors:
It is just way to soon for any of us to start crowing and claiming vindication for our previously held dogmas.
The Global Warming Hystericists have done a lot of damage including to our ability to trust the objectivity of scientists. Skepticism is always warranted. (The change from “global warming skeptic” to “global warming denier” was one of the most evil, and effective, moves of the propagandists.)
Italy’s COVID-19 deaths that are striking the elderly with underlying conditions has a great deal of similarity with the initial outbreak of cases in the Seattle nursing home…and much it has to do with where they are contracting the virus. From a guest columnist at Watts Up With That – a site that typically is devoted to critical analysis of climate science and various alarmist claims come this about the cases of death in Italy:
I would hat tip the Ricochet member who provided this linked article to me but I can’t remember who it was. Memory is the first thing to go…or so they say.
I think that a lot of people are acting as if something has changed and we must now never believe experts or something. The only thing that has changed are the policies of governments. The virus is still lethal, and as Ferguson said may be even more lethal than originally thought.
I gather the sheet shows the effect of disease suppression strategies, and that the earlier suppression is adopted the better. In the US no suppression = 2,654,410 deaths, maximum suppression started early = 84,124 deaths.
The method of suppression is social distancing, case isolation, and quarantines which is maintained until a vaccine is developed.
As it is we’ve got 50 strategies of various intensity. We are mostly talking about mitigation, social distancing for a few months at most to flatten the curve, which would still give us deaths in the hundreds of thousands according to the paper.
Jon,
I just made a comment on Rodin’s post. I think it also applies exactly to this news.
Once CNN and the gang get the bit in their teeth it will be very hard to pull back on the reins. They love to scream the sky is falling and news that the sky is not falling will upset them. Of course, Trump seems to thrive on upsetting them so there is hope.
Regards,
Jim
Jon,
Wow, did this one catch my eye. We are living through a time when people just want a narrative that they are comfortable with and can’t be bothered to wade through the facts or wait for a careful analysis.
We pay a price for this.
Regards,
Jim
Where is the data of CV-19 deaths by location – people in their homes…people in nursing homes…people in hospitals…people in ICUs – by age and whether they had other underlying or active medical conditions – like cancer, respiratory conditions, diabetes, heart disease, kidney issues (on dialysis) or other health- or immune-compromising issues?
Unless that specific data starts to become published, then universal numbers that treat all segments equally only serves to propagate a panic narrative.
There is a reason that Italy has been adversely affected and why the virus ran rampant in a nursing home in Seattle – because nearly all of the victims were elderly with other underlying conditions and in a facility where the virus could easily and quickly propagate amongst the staff and introduced by visitors who were relatively resistant to the effects of the virus.
There…I feel better now.
Virus,
I have seen no one react to this that we must never believe experts, only that one must always remember to believe even experts with a grain of salt. This new report has reduced the projection of the danger from the virus by more than a factor of ten. Also, the lethality of the virus is also questioned by the possibility that most of the deaths were with people that would have had a probable life expectancy of less than 6 months. The regular flu might have killed a majority of these people anyway.
What this is really about is an unwillingness to understand the difficulty of obtaining hard information. Even the very best experts are forced to make projections on very weak data. Now with more information, their projection has been radically changed. The left claims it “believes in science”. I think this is true because they believe in science as if it were a revealed religion. The right at least recognizes our own fallibility and the limits of finite human knowledge.
The right will make mistakes because no one is infallible but the left is prone to make much, much larger mistakes because they believe science and experts to be infallible.
Regards,
Jim