THREAD: Six Flights from Wuhan That Led to an Unprecedented Global Disaster…

Let me tell you a story. It’s about six passenger flights from Wuhan that led to an unprecedented global disaster.

These six flights help to explain why the entire world was gripped by fear, with consequences that we’ll be living with for many years to come.

Thread.

In 2020, the world became convinced that a deadly coronavirus was plaguing the human race.

A virus that could kill nearly 1 out of every 100 people it infected, or so we were told.

Come with me, and I’ll show you where that belief came from.

Remember that in March, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London predicted 510,000 Covid-19 deaths in Britain and 2.2 million Covid-19 deaths in the US. Healthcare systems would be overwhelmed.

This could only be avoided by “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (lockdown, etc.)

As an influential member of SAGE, Ferguson’s predictions were crucial in triggering the UK government into imposing lockdown.

In early May, Boris Johnson insisted it was a “fact” that half a million lives were saved by lockdown, compared to the “reasonable worst case scenario”.

At the heart of Ferguson’s predictions was the estimate that Covid-19 could kill 0.9% of the British people it infected, and could infect up to 80% of the population.

The source for this belief was “an analysis of a subset of cases from China”.

Let’s go down the rabbit hole…

The analysis of Chinese data was carried out by Robert Verity (also of Imperial College) and others, in February and March 2020.

But it was originally conceived by Neil Ferguson (“NMF”), who also contributed to the study.

Taking the age of the Chinese people into account, this study estimated that the infection fatality rate in China was 0.66% (and was probably between 0.39% and 1.33%).

Covid-19 was “a major global health threat” that would overwhelm “even the most advanced healthcare systems”.

But how did they calculate this?…