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Comment by GrantZvolsky | Hacker News Reader

To say the government opted 'to encourage the flames' is disingenuous. Presumably their statistical model indicated they won't be able to contain the spread which is why the current stated aim is to delay the spread[0]. Delay, not encourage.

The article's suggestions seem to be in line with the government's stance. The main difference is timing with Dr William Hanage saying measures should have been adopted weeks ago while the government claims their modelling tells them to adopt measures later.

The government should be challenged by questioning whether it truly is/was impossible to contain the epidemic and what the best time to introduce different measures is. This article, however, adds very little to that debate with hand-waving in place of evidence.

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/covid-19-government-annou...

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>> Presumably their statistical model indicated they won't be able to contain the spread which is why the current stated aim is to delay the spread[0].

What statistical model? They're talking of "careful modelling". In the article you link, they don't mention anything about statistics, or, say, a simulation etc. You're assuming too much when you're assuming a statistical model, or anything based on data, or any concrete sort of model at all. "Modelling" can just mean a bunch of officials sitting around having tea and brainstorming potential scenarios.

> "Modelling" can just mean a bunch of officials sitting around having tea and brainstorming potential scenarios.

Good point, but it doesn't seem to be the case. From the Coronavirus action plan[0] published on March 3 2020

> The UK is a world leader in the field of outbreak modelling and data analytics. The NIHR HPRU in Modelling Methodology led by Imperial College London has developed novel analytical and computational tools which exploit novel data streams on infectious diseases such as COVID-19. This group and other leading academic groups have developed tools to prepare for infectious disease outbreaks, which include real time infectious disease models, allowing policy decisions to be made using the best possible data and are actively modelling questions of relevance to dealing with the COVID–19 outbreak.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Well, Imperial is a fine research institution indeed, but this still doesn't cut the mustard. Sure, Imperial boffins may be creating "real time infectious disease models" and those models may "allow" policy decisions to be made, but this tells us nothing about what we really want to know: whether these models were actually used to take the decisions we're discussing, instead of some other process.

Really, the claims of having done "careful modelling" absent any evidence of that modelling (say, a graph or a table of the results) is a really bad sign.

I hope the number of available hospital beds in the UK matches their statistics model.

It’s not true, Italy had exactly the same deaths per day two weeks ago. They introduced the complete lockdown what will be tomorrow. They had 2 weeks of advantage compared to Italy, they already knew what the future was going to look like, and they squandered it all without doing anything. Now uk is going to be in a much worse situation compared to Italy because of this. Just one day of delay in an exponential curve can mean possibly tens of thousands death. Here we are speaking about weeks or months of delay if they really want to infect 60% of the people. The nazis probably caused less deaths in concentration camps than boris, but we’ll know for sure in a couple of months.

Holocaust involved death of 1-11 million people (depending on sources and who you want to count). Not a fan of government's current approach, but Boris shouldn't grow a pencil moustache just yet.

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