> Again, being disingenuous. You specifically used the example of the revised IHME model of 60,000 deaths and not the one which they predicted before that where they predicted 510,000 deaths in G.B. and 2.2 million in the U.S.

Wrong. The numbers you are quoting are Imperial college predictions, not IHME. And those predictions are for a ZERO mitigation strategy where the disease runs through the entire population to achieve herd immunity (i.e. what humans used to do before disease theory was understood during smallpox epidemics or the Black Death). They are non-falsifiable because we didn’t actually try such a strategy. I’m wondering if you didn’t read the paper yourself because I’ve seen these numbers flying around and invariably people are getting the info from secondary sources who misrepresent it.

You can see the actual paper you’re referring to here (and have mistakenly cited as IHME). https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m... “ In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.”

They go onto model interventions such as closing restaurants, schools, isolating over-70s, and so on, all of which they predict would lead to significantly less death toll - you can see the figures yourself.

And you can see from this early April article that their model in fact far underpredicted the number of deaths from an intervention strategy. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britai...

> LONDON (Reuters) - UK deaths from the coronavirus could rise to between about 7,000 and 20,000 under measures taken to slow the spread of the virus, Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College in London who has helped shape the government’s response, said on Sunday.

The IHME model, on the other hand, never had these numbers. You can see the IHME model dating to March 25, 2020 at http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/research...

> We estimate 81,114 (95% UI 38,242 to 162,106) deaths in the United States from COVID-19 over the next 4 months.

In just two months, we’ve already passed over their prediction of 81k deaths in the USA.

You’ve posted a lot so I don’t want to respond to everything because I don’ think this will convince you, but if you actually look up the “predictions” referenced in that Telegraph article you’ll understand it misrepresents Ferguson’s quotes. For instance, the death estimate from bird flue was only if that strain jumped over to be easily human-to-human transmissible, which it never has. The prediction for BSE was 50 to 500k, which is admittedly a pretty large range but the final number of 177 fell within it. The “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu was explicitly a worst-case scenario - not a prediction of what was actually going to happen. Obviously there were non-worst-case scenarios too. It turned out H1N1 wasn’t as dangerous as some early estimates predicted.

As far as Ferguson’s code having problems, seems like it. But again, his model significantly underpredicted how dangerous COVID-19 would be if we responded using NPIs, so pointing to it and other models as the problem makes no sense.

Cigarettes and driving aren’t contagious - cigarettes barely affect anyone else via second-hand smoke and we spend enormous sums of money on making driving safer every year.

Obviously there is a cost-benefit calculation to be made in everything. COVID-19 is getting a much stronger response than flu because it is so much more deadly than the flu or common cold viruses.