[LINK] The government's coronavirus modelling

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

What really annoys me is when the government tries to do a snow job on
us all

Scotty from marketing today put on his salesman's hat and tried to
convince the country that his presentation on coronavirus modelling was
all they had.

This was the slide deck he used:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.scribblelive.com/2020/4/7/2928378_340853142bc011a4-b1b9-4fd2-9358-d26f2130b1a5.pdf

A few little details.

There is nothing in those slides that applies to Australia.

He references the University of Melbourne (Doherty Institute) pandemic
modelling team but not Quantium Health.

According to this:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/mar/28/government-increases-spend-on-covid-19-data-analytics-as-it-declines-to-release-modelling

"The health department upped its spend on a contract with Quantium
Health from $1.1m to $3.1m"

Quantium Health is a Joint Venture between Discovery Ltd, and Quantium Group

Discovery Ltd is a South African Financial services company

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery

and the Quantium group does data analytics.

https://quantium.com/

Their web site says: "Translating raw data into actionable insight"

It looks to me as though they have done a lot of economic modelling but
a) don't want to own up to it and b) have done no pandemic modelling
beyond what others have done and released weeks ago.

If you want to see what modelling has been going on around the world
look at this:

https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/forecasting

especially Imperial College work.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

Scotty said in his presentation that more realistic models and plans
will be developed and that the "Focus of future modelling is based on
real world Australian data"

The government must have a lot of data already otherwise Quantium Health
would have nothing to show for its millions. What modelling has the
government already done on that data but has not released?

I can't believe they have been making decisions on the modelling they
released today. They may cunning but they are not stupid.

IMHO, the big questions are "What is he hiding and why?"

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email: brd at iimetro.com.au