1) It feeds the fear factor that is prompting Beijing residents to functionally remain in lockdown of their own volition. Regardless of how realistic the models are or are not, they are a part of the narrative that has kept Chinese citizens fearful of COVID since 2020.
2) It highlights the degree to which the CCP has simply lied about their COVID numbers to date. A model which predicts 1 million deaths in a country that truly has only had 5285 deaths from what is presumably the same virus would be even more absurd that Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
[with one model projecting as many as 1 million deaths from COVID during the current outbreak.]
Oh, thank goodness- bring on the models!
The significance of the model is twofold:
1) It feeds the fear factor that is prompting Beijing residents to functionally remain in lockdown of their own volition. Regardless of how realistic the models are or are not, they are a part of the narrative that has kept Chinese citizens fearful of COVID since 2020.
2) It highlights the degree to which the CCP has simply lied about their COVID numbers to date. A model which predicts 1 million deaths in a country that truly has only had 5285 deaths from what is presumably the same virus would be even more absurd that Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
I'm not sure anything could be more absurd than Neil Ferguson's Imperial College models.
It seemed like IC's predictions shook up a lot of otherwise sensible people.
Impossible to prove, but I felt that at the time they were released, they were the catalyst to much of the insanity.
Few had the sense to look up their track record...
Neil Ferguson's model was, by his own admission, a big pile of spaghetti code.
When he made that revelation on Twitter I knew the IC models were complete garbage.
https://twitter.com/allfacts_matter/status/1241995253080567809?s=20&t=uMOCCjsihMqJYooGYObvLg
When he finally released the source code to the public, no one could replicate his results--or their own results from model run to model run.
But by then, the damage had already done.
The retraction wasn't covered, and the horse was out of the barn.
Panic ensued.