Coding That Led to Lockdown Was ‘Totally Unreliable’ and a ‘Buggy Mess’, Says, Experts

The code, written by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, was impossible to read, scientists claim…

The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.

Professor Neil Ferguson’s computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on”.

The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.

“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”

The comments are likely to reignite a row over whether the UK was right to send the public into lockdown, with conflicting scientific models having suggested people may have already acquired substantial herd immunity and that Covid-19 may have hit Britain earlier than first thought. Scientists have also been split on what the fatality rate of Covid-19 is, which has resulted in vastly different models.

Up until now, though, the significant weight has been attached to Imperial’s model, which placed the fatality rate higher than others and predicted that 510,000 people in the UK could die without a lockdown.

It was said to have prompted a dramatic change in policy from the Government, causing businesses, schools, and restaurants to be shuttered immediately in March. The Bank of England has predicted that the economy could take a year to return to normal, after facing its worst recession for more than three centuries.  

The Imperial model works by using code to simulate transport links, population size, social networks, and healthcare provisions to predict how coronavirus would spread. However, questions have since emerged over whether the model is accurate after researchers released the code behind it, which in its original form was “thousands of lines” developed over more than 13 years.

In its initial form, developers claimed the code had been unreadable, with some parts looking “like they were machine translated from Fortran”, an old coding language, according to John Carmack, an American developer, who helped clean up the code before it was published online. Yet, the problems appear to go much deeper than messy coding. Show more

Many have claimed that it is almost impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data, using the same code. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported such an issue, saying they got different results when they used different machines, and even in some cases when they used the same machines.  

“There appears to be a bug in either the creation or re-use of the network file. If we attempt two completely identical runs, only varying in that the second should use the network file produced by the first, the results are quite different,” the Edinburgh researchers wrote on the Github file.

After a discussion with one of the Github developers, a fix was later provided. This is said to be one of the numbers of bugs discovered within the system. The Github developers explained this by saying that the model is “stochastic”, and that “multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behavior”.

However, it has prompted questions from specialists, who say “models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters…otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable.”

It comes amid a wider debate over whether the Government should have relied more heavily on numerous models before making policy decisions.

Writing for telegraph.co.uk, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Principal at Jesus College, said that “having a diverse variety of models, particularly those that enable policymakers to explore predictions under different assumptions, and with different interventions, is incredibly powerful”.

Like the Imperial code, a rival model by Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University works on a so-called “SIR approach” in which the population is divided into those that are susceptible, infected, and recorded. However, while Gupta made the assumption that 0.1pc of people infected with coronavirus would die, Ferguson placed that figure at 0.9pc.

That led to a dramatic reversal in government policy from attempting to build “herd immunity” to a full-on lockdown. Experts remain baffled as to why the government appeared to dismiss other models.

“We’d be up in arms if weather forecasting was based on a single set of results from a single model and missed taking that umbrella when it rained,” says Michael Bonsall, Professor of Mathematical Biology at Oxford University.

Concerns, in particular, over Ferguson’s model have been raised, with Konstantin Boudnik, vice-president of architecture at WANdisco, saying his track record in modeling doesn’t inspire confidence. 

In the early 2000’s, Ferguson’s models incorrectly predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu.

“The facts from the early 2000s are just yet another confirmation that their modeling approach was flawed to the core,” says Dr. Boudnik. “We don’t know for sure if the same model/code was used, but we clearly see their methodology wasn’t rigorous then and surely hasn’t improved now.”

A spokesperson for the Imperial College COVID19 Response Team said: “The UK Government has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making. As has been repeatedly stated, decision-making around lockdown was based on a consensus view of the scientific evidence, including several modeling studies by different academic groups.

“Multiple groups using different models concluded that the pandemic would overwhelm the NHS and cause unacceptably high mortality in the absence of extreme social distancing measures. Within the Imperial research team, we use several models of differing levels of complexity, all of which produce consistent results. We are working with a number of legitimate academic groups and technology companies to develop, test, and further document the simulation code referred to. However, we reject the partisan reviews of a few clearly ideologically motivated commentators.

“Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions  around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus that COVID-19 is a highly transmissible virus with an infection fatality ratio exceeding 0.5pc in the UK.”

The World Is In Big Trouble, for Those That Believe We Will Go Back to Some Sense of Normal Life Here on Earth, You Will Be Sadly Disappointed, Seven and Half Years of Hell on Earth Which Began January 1, 2020

“Our courts oppose the righteous, and justice is nowhere to be found. Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed” (Isa. 59:14, NLT)…We Turned Our Backs On GOD, Now We Have Been Left To Our Own Devices, Enjoy…

While Mainstream Media Continues to Push a False Narrative, Big Tech Has to Keep the Truth From Coming out by Shadow Banning Conservatives, Christians, and Like-Minded People, Those Death Attributed to the Coronavirus Is a Result of Those Mentioned, They Truly Are Evil…

Source: HNewsWire www.telegraph.co.uk

StevieRay Hansen
Editor, HNewsWire.com
Watchmen does not confuse truth with consensus The Watchmen does not confuse God’s word with the word of those in power…

In police-state fashion, Big Tech took the list of accused (including this site), declared all those named guilty and promptly shadow-banned, de-platformed or de-monetized us all without coming clean about how they engineered the crushing of dissent, Now more than ever big Tech has exposed there hand engaging in devious underhanded tactics to make the sinister look saintly, one of Satan’s greatest weapons happens to be deceit…

The accumulating death toll from Covid-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels. But there’s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair.

American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen. By racket, I mean an enterprise organized explicitly to make money dishonestly.

All the official reassurances won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit. The Globals are behind the CoronaVirus, It Is a Man-Made Bioweapon.

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