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1 Back in April the University of Washington IHME's covid-19 model was criticised for "…. producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever":
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/
What was going on there and why were the predictions so untrustworthy?
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/
What was going on there and why were the predictions so untrustworthy?
2 IHME and Oxford "modelling" had been dominating the news since March. Here is their "beoutbreakprepared" github account:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019
When was the modelling code created and the data collected?
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019
When was the modelling code created and the data collected?
3 Let's look at the timeline of the account:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared?tab=overview&from=2019-06-01&to=2019-06-30
No activity between July and December 2019, then suddenly on **December 11th** they're creating a public-facing GitHub subdomain titled "BeOutbreakPrepared".
https://beoutbreakprepared.github.io/
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared?tab=overview&from=2019-06-01&to=2019-06-30
No activity between July and December 2019, then suddenly on **December 11th** they're creating a public-facing GitHub subdomain titled "BeOutbreakPrepared".
https://beoutbreakprepared.github.io/
4 Their nCoV2019 repository was created as a private repository, then turned into a public repository. But they didn't realize GitHub would timestamp the private creation time and thought the timestamp of the repository would be the time when they went public - **January 24th**.
5 The JHU map went live January 22nd. The fatalities from COVID-19 on January 24th was in the double digits for the planet. WHO declared a public health emergency on January 30th. Somehow JHU, IHME and Oxford knew on January 24th that we needed to be prepared for an outbreak.
6 That's a snapshot of the github repository as it was on January 26th. Look at the source data on that day:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/tree/df49444527a723b047f6c2d20a572f4c5b047472
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/tree/df49444527a723b047f6c2d20a572f4c5b047472
7 So IHME created a GitHub page in December 2019 called "BeOutbreakPrepared" and one month later they're creating a private repository for an "outbreak" that's counting 31 cases outside of mainland China, with zero fatalities outside China, and just 2 infections in the USA.
8 This is the initial raw data in the repository, captured January 25th:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/d834bfcccf5669a217a848cce5e644dec0a15d76
Why would a team at IHME/Oxford create a repository on GitHub to track an "outbreak" that's confined to China, but already put everything in place to track it across the globe?
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/d834bfcccf5669a217a848cce5e644dec0a15d76
Why would a team at IHME/Oxford create a repository on GitHub to track an "outbreak" that's confined to China, but already put everything in place to track it across the globe?
9 These are the initial contributors:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/e4234004cbe47e95042fc55d6da780364fecf8d2
Acknowledgments on January 25th:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/d01fd7eaf246c6919d11f272dd9a49c13b9fb72a
How did they know to do all this work BEFORE the WHO declared declared a public health emergency and before they declared a pandemic on 11 March?
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/e4234004cbe47e95042fc55d6da780364fecf8d2
Acknowledgments on January 25th:
https://github.com/beoutbreakprepared/nCoV2019/commit/d01fd7eaf246c6919d11f272dd9a49c13b9fb72a
How did they know to do all this work BEFORE the WHO declared declared a public health emergency and before they declared a pandemic on 11 March?
