Professor Lockdown
Post #1276
Prominent British COVID modeler, Neil Ferguson, earned the title of Professor Lockdown. In March 2020, he claimed that COVID was a type of thing which could kill 40 million people:
And even after he revised his estimate of the communicability (transmission) of COVID at the end of March 2020, he still stood by his overall estimates of overall deaths, the lower infection fatality rate (IFR) from the higher number of cases would supposedly balance each other out — leading to just as many deaths as predicted prior:
But Diamond Princess data was available by then, and that data was a natural experiment showing what was possible. Only passengers died, but they were all infected prior to 16 Feb 2020 (no symptomatic passenger cases got found after 16 Feb 2020), and over a month later, just 7 deaths in total were found:
Even more striking is the age distribution of the deaths that were found — from that half of COVID cases which had been symptomatic — where it was discovered that all 7 deaths were elderly (age 70 or higher):
But if you use the age distribution for flu deaths to estimate the overall COVID infection fatality rate from these elderly COVID deaths — i.e., the elderly flu IFR is over 6x higher than the overall flu IFR — then COVID works out to be only approximately as lethal as a severe seasonal flu, and you can’t cause 40 million deaths with seasonal flu:
[click image to enlarge]
If the Diamond Princess IFR was 1% (i.e., 7 deaths from ~700 infections), but it was all deaths among the elderly, then the expected COVID IFR would be much lower than 1% (it would be similar to severe flu) — assuming that the rise in IFR with age with COVID is every bit as great as it is with flu.
Reference
[“Professor Lockdown” got it wrong] — https://www.iedm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/note032020_en.pdf
[Still wrong with the 26 Mar 2020 update] — https://x.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294816777252865
[by 18 Mar 2020 (over a month past last passenger infection): 7 passenger deaths] — Jimi H, Hashimoto G. Challenges of COVID-19 outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess docked at Yokohama, Japan: a real-world story. Glob Health Med. 2020 Apr 30;2(2):63-65. doi: 10.35772/ghm.2020.01038. PMID: 33330779; PMCID: PMC7731266. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7731266/
[the 7 Diamond Princess passenger deaths were all age 70-plus (most were 80-plus)] — Russell TW, Hellewell J, Jarvis CI, van Zandvoort K, Abbott S, Ratnayake R; CMMID COVID-19 working group; Flasche S, Eggo RM, Edmunds WJ, Kucharski AJ. Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, February 2020. Euro Surveill. 2020 Mar;25(12):2000256. doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.12.2000256. PMID: 32234121; PMCID: PMC7118348. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7118348/