The lockdown was a waste of time and could kill more than it saved, says Nobel laureate fr24news.com/a/2020/05/the-… via @FR24 News English 
Michael Levitt, a professor at Stanford University who correctly predicted the initial magnitude of the pandemic, suggested that the decision to keep people inside was motivated by “panic” rather than better science.
Professor Levitt also said that the modeling that led the government to impose the foreclosure – done by Professor Neil Ferguson – had overestimated the number of deaths by “10 or 12 times”.
Professor Levitt told the Telegraph: “I think the lock-up has not saved any lives. I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few lives from traffic accidents, things like that, but the social damage – domestic abuse, divorce, alcoholism – has been extreme.
And then you have those who have not been treated for other conditions.”
Professor Levitt, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 for “developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” said for 2 months that most expert predictions about the virus were wrong.
Professor Levitt, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013 for “developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems,” said for 2 months that most expert predictions about the virus were wrong.
Professor Levitt added, “For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and people panicked. There has been a huge lack of discussion.”
Although Professor Levitt recognizes that lockdowns can be effective, he describes them as “medieval” and believes that epidemiologists exaggerate their claims so that people are more likely to listen to them.
His comments come as other scientists working in the same field also reported that they could not verify Professor Ferguson’s work.
Research by competing scientists – whose models have produced very different results – has been largely overlooked by government advisers.
David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco, said Ferguson’s model was a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel-haired pasta than a piece of fine programming.”
Professor Neil Ferguson’s predictions prompted the government to impose a lockdown, but his models could have overestimated the spread of the virus by hundreds of thousands
Richards said, “In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone to develop code like this and any company that depended on it to produce software for sale would likely go bankrupt. “
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have also reportedly found bugs when the model was run, obtaining different results when using different machines, or even the same machines in some cases.
Four experienced modelers have previously noted that the code is “deeply bug-ridden”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “probably the worst production code I have ever seen”.
After the model’s grim prediction, Professor Michael Thursdayfield of the University of Edinburgh criticized Professor Ferguson’s file as “irregular”.
