tions of the Right” that Professor Ferguson got his initial predictions wrong, but asserts that the experience in Manaus comes close to proving him right.
Where people did not change their behaviour it has not been pretty. In Manaus, Brazil, a city of 2.2 million people seems to have had at least 45 per cent infection, probably 70 per cent, and the results aren’t that far from the apocalypse of the March 16 paper. In April gravediggers had to work at night. Coffins ran out. Bodies were buried in trenches.
But aside from the details about gravediggers and bodies being buried in trenches that have been cited in many articles about Manaus, I can’t seem to make the maths work.
The March 16th paper that Whipple is referring to forecast that in a scenario without interventions, 81% of the UK population would become infected, and that 0.9% of them would die, ie 510,000 fatalities. That, famously, was the scenario that bounced the UK government into changing its approach.
But Manaus is a city of 2.2 million people. If we are to use it as proof that he was right, we should expect to have seen c 1.8m infections and c 16,000 deaths. As of today, the Brazilian health authority records 3,297 deaths in Manaus— a tragically high number but less than a quarter of the Ferguson scenario. Whipple suggests that between 45% and 70% of the city has been infected, but even if deaths have been miscounted and there were twice as many, it wouldn’t come close to the Ferguson projections.
Maybe I’ve missed something here, but how are these results ‘not far from the apocalypse of the March 16th paper’?
"Following the science" has become a mantra for supporting the likes of Ferguson. No need to massage the stats, though….
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