Ferguson has already been scapegoated. It started at Off-Guardian and UK Column, and now it’s in the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Sun. Ferguson’s presence on the SAGE Committee is about all that averted utter carnage. The corporate sector took to hating him for shutting down much of the economy and set a team of “reporters” after him, just waiting for him to put a foot wrong. Those “reporters” must have all been breaking the stay-at-home order too, but no mention of that…
The ICL model seems pretty good to me. It has served its purpose by dissuading the government from their murderous “herd immunity” plan. ICL’s “total infected so far” figure seems to match post-peak antibody studies within a factor of two, which is damn good modelling for a brand new disease. So if the UK has ~40,000 dead and ~6% infected so far, and infection would reach say 75% before causing the epidemic to self-limit, we could expect:
40,000 x (100/6) x (75/100) = 500,000 – Spot on the ICL figure!
ICL did very well indeed. They weren’t asleep when covid-19 cut through Wuhan. They collected their data and tweaked their model, and had their output ready to present when it arrived.