The British scientist known as Professor Lockdown has undermined the draconian policy he unleashed on the world by confessing that Britain hasn’t fared any better in tackling the disease than the laid-back Scandis.
“It represents a human sacrifice on the altar of economics, and it is wholly unacceptable.”
They told the Financial Times the new report would not be made public for another few weeks after it was peer-reviewed by other scientists and published in a journal.
Neil Ferguson’s team has sent modelling findings to government but not released them to the public.
The publication of a long-awaited report from Imperial College London that models the impact of coming out of lockdown has been delayed for several weeks, following criticism of the team’s methods.
We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.
During the same FORTRAN standards committee meeting at which the name “FORTRAN 77” was chosen, a satirical technical proposal was incorporated into the official distribution bearing the title “Letter O Considered Harmful”.