
Don’t Like What the Virus Models Say? Try Building Your Own - hannibalhorn
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-14/how-to-better-understand-coronavirus-fatality-rate-models
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hannibalhorn
I find the modelling discussion really interesting.

The Imperial College report that kinda kicked off mitigation efforts in the
west was pretty bleak. I didn't question it myself, but just a few days later
I saw a Bill Gates AMA where he said the model in that report used some
parameters that were a bit too negative. [1]

Not long after, the lead author of the report announced he was getting help
from Microsoft (and apparently even John Carmack?) to clean up the code
involved. It's apparently several thousand lines of undocumented C written 13+
years ago. [2] The software engineer in me can't help but be skeptical as to
how accurate it is in the current situation. Data science has changed quite a
bit in the last decade.

1\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/fkuojny)
2\.
[https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713](https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713)

~~~
SyneRyder
Carmack tweeted about the extent of his involvement:

 _" People are going to get the wrong idea about this from some of the
headlines. I have been helping out for the last week as a “generic strong C
programmer”, mostly doing static analysis, code quality, and resource
optimization work. The code has been in development for a decade+."_

[1]
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1244302925855326209](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1244302925855326209)

