Mirth wrote:
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It is also worth noting, given the amount of criticism that the UK government has come under for the urgency (or lack thereof) of its response, that Ferguson told BBC radio on Tuesday on the UK’s response:
"The measures which have just been taken, the earliest we’d expect to see an effect on the growth of the epidemic is about two to three weeks time.
I overall think we’ve got the timing about right."
I have come to respect Dr. Neil Ferguson over the past couple of months: he's calm, not arrogant or bombastic in any way, but, given that he is one of the most senior advisors to the government and in many ways now the only science advisor, other than Sir Patrick Vallance, the public can put a name and a face too, saying anything other than they have got it right until now is about the only thing he can say.
If he came out and said to the public: "there were errors in our model that resulted in understimating the number of ICU patients in the UK even at this early stage by half, and not realising until a few days ago that a strategy of mitigation instead of suppression would result in a best case scenario of 250,000 people dying"--which is exactly the point the paper he and his Imperial colleagues have published made very clearly--it would not do any good for the confidence levels in the government for the vast majority of the population that won't read a scientific paper but will see a clip played on Twitter or BBC news of a man integral to shaping the UK's response to this disaster admitting he was part of a flawed approach.
It's for the same reason Trump's approval rating has actually gone up during the crisis, despite his spectacular stupidity and ignorance:
[Twitter]
He simply won't admit he was wrong and a great many of the population aren't informed enough to know or care; imagine the panic that would ensue if Trump stared straight into the camera during his next presedential address and made a heartfelt apology for his ineptitude until this point? Meltdown.
I'm not comparing Neil Ferguson to Trump btw, but even CSO Patrick Vallance was incredibly shifty and evasive when he was asked about the Imperial paper, even though he would have been part of the decision to make the information in it public. I would say that came about because there has been pressure from the scientific community for the data and findings to be released which were informing the gov's approach and also to justify the Draconian measures that would now come to that same community in order to foster support instead of opposition.
I accept that this is a fluid situation where government policy has to adapt as more data becomes available, but the point of modelling is to try to predict what will come; the fact that the UK's scientific advisors have realised in the past few days that suppression is the only viable option, at least in the short to medium term, is a very big deal. We need people to listen to the government and do as they're told in the next weeks or months--that can only happen if the majority believe that Boris and his advisors know what they're doing; otherwise we're sunk.
