Readers don’t need to be reminded on the damage being caused to the UK economy as a result of the coronavirus epidemic. Most of the damage has been caused by the “lock-down” that has closed whole swathes of UK business and industry. There can’t be many readers’ stock market portfolios which have not suffered as a result. The lock-down was all done based on the advice of Prof. Ferguson of Imperial College and a computer model that he used.
This is what Steve Baker, M.P. tweeted today: “Today, I read the Imperial College Covid-19 Code: https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim . I then read this for a second time with growing horror: https://thecritic.co.uk/a-series-of-tubes/ . Software critical to the safety and prosperity of tens of millions of people has been hacked out, badly. It is a scandal.”
This is what I wrote yesterday in my diary (which I have kept since the start of the epidemic to make interesting reading for my offspring in future years):
“There has been a lot of controversy of late over the role of Professor Neil Ferguson in the epidemic crisis. He is professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London and has been advising on the UK government’s response. His virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in place. It seems his past forecasts of the impact of epidemics of other diseases have been wildly pessimistic. He has now resigned from the Government advisory body after ignoring the lock-down rules to meet a paramour.
But when people looked at the software code that he has been using to forecast epidemic spread, it seemed to be unreliable. It consisted of 15,000 lines of undocumented and unstructured code that allegedly gave different answers when run more than once. It very much appears to be a rather unprofessional approach to software development that one might expect from a scientist rather than an IT professional”.
I then covered my past career as a programmer and lamented the lack of professionalism in some parts of the world as regards software development, 40 years after I gave up programming. This is a good quotation from the Daily Mail on the latest fiasco: “David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco said the model was a ‘buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming’. He also said: ‘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’.”
So now you know why we are all stuck at home and in such a financial mess.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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Are you saying that there was no need for a lock-down? You need, perhaps, to be a little clearer in your summation?
I think people should draw their own conclusions from the evidence. But it does seem to me that the lock-down was excessive and badly targeted.