On the evening of March 23rd 2020, Jacinda Adhern locked the country down saying:
New medical modelling considered by the Cabinet today suggests that without the measures I have just announced up to tens of thousands of New Zealanders could die from COVID-19.
In times of crisis, a real leader aims to keep the population calm and free from irrational fear. This instead, was a gross exaggeration. I would call it a lie except she said ‘up to’ before ‘tens of thousands’ so she’ll get off on a technicality. A couple of days later in an interview with hyperventilating TV anchor John Campbell claiming that without these measures hundreds of thousands will die, Jacinda nodded her toothy grin in affirmation- no correction was made to bring Campbell back to reality! Panic, panic, panic.
But what did the modelling really say? At that date, there had been 3 medical models prepared for the NZ Ministry of Health by Prof Nick Wilson, with Dr Lucy Telfar Barnard, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, & Prof Michael Baker in tow. None of these reports indicated ‘tens of thousands of deaths’. These studies explored possible scenarios for health measures taken, and different R-naught values1. All scenarios were based on an infection fatality rate of 0.45%, far higher than the 0.1% that actually transpired.
In these models, ‘Heath intervention’ was described as:
This variable covers the summated impact of a potentially wide variety of different interventions: people may adopt enhanced personal hygiene measures (hand washing, cough etiquette etc); they may decide to have fewer contacts (physical distancing); and governments may close venues and schools, restrict mass transit, curtail mass gatherings, and restrict travel (within and between countries).
Nothing about shutting the whole economy down and mask mandates. The study covered 2 scenarios for intervention, 25% and 50% compliance with the above- so probably ordinary handwashing and staying at home if your sick at 25%. Throw in some more hand washing and maybe isolating rest homes and you might be at a supposed 50%. At least, this is what you might conclude from the reports, but in reality the model2 app only looked at isolation for the sick and a generalised contact reduction3.
The last study4, published on the the 23rd of March, just hours before Jacinda’s lockdown speech, and certainly the one Cabinet was briefed on, shows a worst case scenario, using the maximum R0 of R3.5, and only 25% intervention, resulting in 14,400 deaths. That’s not tens of thousands. There were 5 other scenarios, the best of which would result in only 7 deaths.
7 deaths? That’s uncannily close to the actual number we had in NZ for the first year if you exclude the ‘died with’ from the total.
With this background in mind let me repeat what Jacinda said:
New medical modelling considered by the Cabinet today suggests that without the measures I have just announced up to tens of thousands of New Zealanders could die from COVID-19.
The modelling did not indicate measures anywhere near the severity of those that she had just announced and it did not indicate the numbers of deaths she implied. Was this deliberate deception or did she just get carried away with the drama of the moment?
For the record, here’s figure 2 from the March 23 report with the actual infections laid over the top. I had to multiply the actual infections by 100 so they would be visible above the zero line:
You can see by this how far even the best case model was from reality.
Nick Wilson to the rescue.
The next day, Nick Wilson, acting on his own, produced another report to save Jacinda from this this dishonest over exaggeration. He cranked up the death rate from 0.45% to 0.83% (8 times the actual death rate), increased the number of sick arriving in NZ by a factor of 10, and using the highest value of R-naught and the least intervention of 25%, produced a report that showed 27,600 would die.
Well done Nick, you should look at changing professions, you’d make a great masseuse.
So NZ was scared into locking down, destroying lives and livelihoods on the back of gross exaggeration on the part of the PM and dishonest modelling to cover for her.
By the way, you didn’t need to be an ‘expert’ to do any of this. The covidSIM modelling software, developed by…you guessed it… Neil Fergusson5 at the Imperial College of London, is available online here for anyone to play around with. Go ahead, plug in your own made up numbers and see how many ‘tens of thousands’ you can kill with Covid.
An R-naught (R0) value is how many people one infected person will infect.
http://version-1.0.covidsim.eu/
If the contact reduction and isolation values are increased the net result is merely a delay in the peak with minimal reduction in overall cases and deaths is achieved, but as can be imagined , the economic and heath cost the increased intervention would rise dramatically. The model does not factor this in.
Prof Neil Ferguson made a name for himself by grossly overestimating the spread of foot and mouth in England leading to the totally unnecessary culling of millions of cows, sheep and pigs, predicted that up to 50,00 would die from mad cow disease, only 177 died, predicting 200 million would die from bird flue in 2005-only 282 died, 65,00 brits would die of Swine Flue in 2009- only 457 died, massively overestimated the death toll from Covid, refusing to divulge the code for his model after questioning from world experts, and finally, getting caught breaking lockdown rules.