Well one of the big limitations of their original Oxford paper is that they didnt want to use death data from after lockdown measures (or more like pre-lockdown measures a week earlier in the UKs case) were introduced, so they chopped things off at that point. Which was quite early on in terms of the death statistics really. And it was an early paper so at that moment they didnt have too much data after that time even if they had wanted to include it. Anyway they also chopped off the results of their model for subsequent dates too, so I cannot now look back and compare their model to the later reality.
As for the question as to timing and how it could make any sense, the original paper had a number of scenarios but the amounts of time relative to first detected case and first detected death were not improbably large as best I can tell. I didnt find it a terribly well presented paper at times, its confusing in certain areas.
(original paper
2020.03.24.20042291v1.full.pdf )
When it first came out I tried to be fair to it, including by pointing out that several of its main points were not the ones the media and anti-lockdown people were seizing on. Having now seen that Gupta interview, I am inclined to believe that it was actually being used by at least one of the authors to push and peddle the very point of view that the media seized on after all.
I'm not very impressed with it or some of her beliefs, but all the same I also consider it to be unwise for me to simply reject every aspect and possibility of it. The timing of lockdown pretty much everywhere did make it very hard to determine all sorts of truths on these matters, and mostly it looks like discovering the truth is only going to happen over time, as we see what impact relaxing lockdowns has in different places over a whole bunch of months. A lot of this stuff is the main reason that I am firmly in a 'hedging my bets' mode these days, why my expectations for the future are relatively blank and I continue to take things one week at a time.
I have to ask though, what the fuck was she on about in regards her thoughts about 100 years ago? Was she really trying to imply that flu wasnt a seasonal thing in those days, and that people were so socially isolated and international travel so limited that that the flu had one big wave every 30 years and then left people alone, with no new opportunities to gain fresh immunity via infection, in the intervening years? Where is the recognition that pandemic influenza happens when a novel strain gets going in humans and large swathes of the population are susceptible to the new strain regardless of how much they have or havent been busy socialising their way towards multiple seasonal infections with other influenza types in the meantime?
It is possible to extract something I can agree with or at least consider sensible to keep in mind and not utterly reject from most of her major points. Even that thing about flu and 100 years ago that makes parts of my brain melt does contain a few points that I can see the sense of, although not when used in quite that manner.
I have to be extra careful with this stuff because what I know about these subjects will mostly be based on stuff I have read, and that stuff will represent certain schools of thought in a number of fields. Its not likely I will happen to pick the correct blend of ideas, or be aware of the details and history of certain positions.
We might need to explore better the reasons why frequent glimpses of concern and fear seem to exist in sections of the epidemiological and public health community when it comes to the idea of properly stopping the public from getting a particular common disease, and of population immunity levels remaining low as a result. Its because that sort of situation is not just something that becomes a hot potato in so many ways in a bad pandemic. It also has a prominent role as a chief villain in the everyday lives of those fighting and monitoring diseases all year, every year. The risk of epidemics and how that risk can be managed will be such a major part of the schools of thought of such experts. Levels of immunity against a particular disease dropping in one or more sections of a population at some moment in time is a classic situation of impending danger, such things will always loom large on the radar because those are the sorts of situations that create the conditions that cause epidemics of non-novel diseases. I'm pretty sure thats also the sort of stuff she was trying to get at with the 100 years ago thing. So it isnt really so weird or a sign of some totally twisted priorities and morality that there are various sorts of specialists out there that regard certain things as desirable or inevitable that sound horrific to us. Its probably just their instincts and training repeatedly leaning them towards a picture where the threat of an epidemic wave of a disease due to dangerous levels of population susceptibility is something to get away from. In normal times I get it, they would favour a picture of relative stability of infection rate rather than cycles of dramatic boom and bust for viruses. I think some of the limitations to this sort of thinking are much more obvious in a pandemic when we are dealing with a novel virus though, at least when the hospitalisation and mortality rate is above a certain level.
Anyway bottom line for me is that the 'first wave combined with various lockdowns etc' really doesnt lead to definitive answers for all these questions to anything like the extent that would settle the arguments. So the waiting game continues.
