There is one major difference between the Imperial study predicting 1m US dead and Oxford study saying 50% of the UK has already been exposed. I didn't want to lambast the Imperial study, though there key assumption is absolutely dead wrong to even a casual China watcher 1/n
The Imperial College study makes the key assumption, and any basic China watcher would know this is wrong not to mention anyone that had been following corona in China, that officially confirmed cases closely matched the total spread of corona in the population. 2/n
Put another way, China data is reliable and if you have corona in China you've been counted. Officially their paper allows for some moderate undercounting. That is how they arrive at the possibility the virus can continue to spread so much further and this is how they 3/n
Arrive at death counts by believing (in general terms) the China case will be the case for the US. Empirical and theoretical research paper after research paper has shown this key and foundational assumption to be completely and entirely wrong. I don't think these guys 4/n
Were malicious or nefarious but arguably the key assumption of their entire paper is simply undeniably wrong. That meant the conclusions they reached were fundamentally wrong in their theoretical paper. Now we can debate whether the number in the UK is actually 50% BUT 5/n
There is very little debate at this point that whatever the official case number is, the true exposure, at a baseline, is likely at least 10x higher, according to some studies significantly more than that. Take corona seriously but details matter.
