CovidSim

CovidSim is an epidemiological model for COVID-19 constructed by Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, led by Neil Ferguson. The model, which predicted 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the United States if their respective governments failed to act, as described by Ferguson in a 20-page paper to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson,[1] was "a critical factor in jolting the UK government into changing its policy on the pandemic" and order a nationwide lockdown.[2][3][4]

Issues with model assumptions and underlying code

The codebase for the model was initially constructed c. 2005.[1] Ferguson said he wrote the "thousands of line of undocumented C" to study influenza pandemics.[5]

New Scientist reported in March 2020 that one group from the New England Complex Systems Institute reviewing the model suggested that it contained "systematic errors".[6] In May 2020, a derivative of the code was released to GitHub. British newspaper The Telegraph reported that software engineers who reviewed the new code called it "totally unreliable" and a "buggy mess".[7] American programmer John Carmack said in April 2020 that he worked on the code before it was released to the public, when it was a single 15,000-line C programming language file and "some of the functions looked like they were machine translated from Fortran", but that "it fared a lot better going through the gauntlet of code analysis tools I hit it with than a lot of more modern code".[8]

An independent review by Codecheck confirmed that they were able to reproduce the key findings from the response team's report by using the software.[9]

See also

References
  1. Bill Bostock (April 25, 2020), "How 'Professor Lockdown' helped save tens of thousands of lives worldwide — and carried COVID-19 into Downing Street", Business Insider
  2. David Adam (April 2, 2020), "Special report: The simulations driving the world's response to COVID-19", Nature
  3. Kate Kelland (March 17, 2020), Sobering coronavirus study prompted Britain to toughen its approach, Reuters
  4. ZEYNEP TUFEKCI (April 2, 2020), "Don't Believe the COVID-19 Models.That's not what they're for.", The Atlantic
  5. Neil Ferguson [@neil_ferguson] (March 22, 2020). "I'm conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the pandemic simulation code we are using..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  6. Jessica Hamzelou (March 23, 2020), "UK's scientific advice on coronavirus is a cause for concern", New Scientist
  7. Boland, Hannah (May 16, 2020). "Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts". The Telegraph. Retrieved May 22, 2020.
  8. John Carmack [@ID_AA_Carmack] (April 27, 2020). "Before the GitHub team started working on the code it was a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade, and some of the functions looked like they were machine translated from Fortran" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  9. "Codecheck confirms reproducibility of COVID-19 model results" (June 2, 2020), Mirage News. Retrieved June 6, 2020.

Further reading
  • Schneider, Kristan; Ngwa, Gideon; Schwehm, Markus; Eichner, Linda; Eichner, Martin (January 2020). "The COVID-19 Pandemic Preparedness Simulation Tool: CovidSIM". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3578789.


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