Cobblers. That is not a position I've ever taken.

Shocking behaviour from Brexit trolls trying to prevent any criticism of the Govt. This is organised at a high level, perhaps even Tory central office itself

This is what Cummings and co have done to our democracy

Ah I see a pile on is being organised on the fantastic @BethRigby because she’s asked a robust question. That’s her job and rightly she’s not going to stop doing it.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) May 7, 2020

We're leading the world as usual.

The Johnson government which sent an RAF plane to Turkey to pick up PPE - without checking if it was fit for purpose - is being ridiculed from Australia to Europe. What a cavalcade of incompetents. https://t.co/sCqB07VItY

— Gavin Esler (@gavinesler) May 7, 2020

Setting aside that it is a highly dubious motive that the author claims for wishing to remain anonymous, the domain name of this website lockdownsceptics.org tells me all I need to know about the partisanship of this analysis.

Johnson was in ICU when the RAF flight to Turkey was organised, so I don't see how he could be held responsible for that.

Gavin Esler is also someone who suffers from BrexitDerangementSyndrome and stood as a candidate for ChangeUK at the election - did him a power of good that!

And Lewis Goodall is? He is a former Labour activist and not an impartial observer.

Well done. That is a libellous claim which I will point out to Lewis. He will probably sue Brian but why should you care?

8415 deaths seems a high figure for its population of about 11.46 million.

All his actions, comments and presentations indicate that Lewis Goodall is not an impartial observer, so I don't know on what basis he could sue for libel, particularly as the case would be impossible to prove (from his point of view). As for him being a Labour activist in the past, that is a point of fact.

How can it possibly be libellous to claim that anyone is not impartial?

I can equally say that Alistair Campbell is not impartial, that Andrew Pierce is not impartial and that Kevin MacGuire is not impartial - they would not deny it.

Perhaps you should take a look at this:

http://isthebbcbiased.blogspot.com/2019/11/introducing-lewis-goodall.html

Wording is important when confined to limited space: 

Thanks Chunky - nice to see a light hearted comment.

Dominic Raab says the infection (R) rate is between 0.5 and 0.9.
But Prof John Edmunds (sits on Sage) just told the Commons science committee it's between 0.75 and 1, and has gone UP in last 2 weeks.
Who is right?

— Arj Singh (@singharj) May 7, 2020

The article is clearly a hatchet job with an agenda so needs to be treated with caution. However that doesn't mean it can't have some valid points.

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim  . Tests are a bugbear of mine - there do now appear to be some python regression tests which compare Excel files, not quite sure what it's doing though.

https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/src/SetupModel.cpp#L510  - this would not pass code review at any company I've worked for.

There are some interesting constants, (aka "assumptions") - for example it appears to model airports and spread via hotels in some way which might be reassuring to MM (or not)

#define MAX_AIRPORTS 5000
#define NNA 10
#define MAX_DIST_AIRPORT_TO_HOTEL 200000.0
#define MIN_HOTELS_PER_AIRPORT 20
#define HOTELS_PER_1000PASSENGER 10

Without spending ages going through the code it's difficult to judge if the article makes justified criticisms. Non-deterministic outputs aren't necessarily as crazy as they seem, particularly with floating point. It's also very difficult to multi thread code that wasn't already designed for it, so it's unsurprising this has been problematic. And so on.

I was tempted to try and build/run it but the memory and CPU requirements look very high and would cause my home PC to melt I suspect.

Look at some rightwing lunatic blog? No thanks!

You can still be an impartial journalist and have held political views in the past! 

No one complains about Sarah Smith. She is brilliant and never accused of bias despite her family background. Lewis is the same. 

Show me a report where he was biased?

You should have a look at the link I posted - someone did some background research on his Twitter history.

He is a journalist. Describing him as impartial is like describing him as unprofessional. It is defamatory. Like describing a copper as bent.

Who cares about the partisanship. I also link to Guardian articles even though I can't stand the Guardian. Plus, as you know, I'm a huge advocate of extending the lockdown; its really rather irrelevant what the political persuasion is of the author.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150424224442/https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lewis-goodall

"Lewis Goodall is a history and politics student at St. John's College, Oxford, and a Labour Party activist and blogger"

Is he also going to sue the Guardian?

pic.twitter.com/fhvT0ITfgO

— Cold War Steve (@Coldwar_Steve) May 6, 2020

Well I am not the only one:

https://order-order.com/2018/08/13/sky-views-by-former-labour-activist/

https://order-order.com/people/lewis-goodall/

That he is a journalist is besides the point - there are plenty of journalists who are openly partial and proud of it, whether of the left or the right.

Indeed, I happen to know something about this stuff too. Although I don't have much experience with C or C++ I have programmed extensively in Python and Fortran and the comments being made in the article came across as credible.

And I checked some of the claims and they all seemed to verify.

As I say I don't care about the political motive of the guy who wrote the article. Everyone has a motive, but it does seem to be good quality analysis in my opinion. If there are any specific problems with the article I'd be interested to know. People shouldn't sneer just because it comes from a guy they might not agree with.

Sodding irony of people having a go at me for linking to a anti-lockdown guy after chastising me for being too pro lockdown for months on end. And this article doesn't change my view on the lockdown. I still think its a good idea, I also think the Imperial model is looking increasingly suspect.

Sweden

• 705 new cases 
• 99 new deaths

Justin

Do you realise what you said in that post?