Coronavirus Australia: Lockdown based on calculation error
Health Minister Greg Hunt today played down the impact of the error in coronavirus modelling used by the Federal Government which sent Australia into a financially crippling lockdown. HERE IS WHAT THEY GOT WRONG.
NSW
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Modelling that provided the basis for the Federal Government’s coronavirus response was kept under wraps despite calls for it to be shared transparently.
The Daily Telegraph on Thursday revealed that two graphs produced by boffins at The Doherty Institute transposed figures that increased intensive care unit admissions fourfold.
At the time Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said “a daily demand for new intensive care beds of 35,000 plus” based on the modelling was “a horrendous scenario.”
James Cook University professor of infectious diseases modelling Emma McBryde said: “We asked for the coding but did not get it.”
Her team finally worked out the mistake, which transposed the possible number of hospital admissions into ICU patients, without the code and pointed out the error.
She said the coding, methodology and results behind the Doherty Institute modelling were kept secret at a time when “more scrutiny would be better than less”.
Her call for more scrutiny was echoed in an open letter to the National Parliament from the Australian Institute for Progress in June that was signed by former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and former Liberal Minister Ian McFarlane and now has more than 1200 signatures online.
“We want the coding to be available,” said Institute director Graham Young. “We cannot just accept the word of one set of experts who are randomly chosen.”
But Health Minister Greg Hunt on Thursday played down the impact of the error on the actions taken to contain the spread of coronavirus.
“I think there was apparently one chart which was public-facing which had a curve drawn in a particular place,” he said of the two graphs which showed intensive care admissions four times higher than they should.
“That hasn’t affected our actions at all,” he said. “It wouldn’t have affected the actions at all because the underlying modelling and all of the work was correct and that hasn’t had an impact.
“I got clear advice from my department on that,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health confirmed it had been informed of “a minor error in plotting of graphs in the Doherty report”.
“The department was satisfied that the error only referred to two visual outputs, or graphs, and it did not affect the underlying modelling outputs. Therefore, the error had no effect on the policy regarding response strategies regarding ICU capacity.”
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A spokeswoman for NSW Health said: “NSW Health considered a variety of advice and data sources along with the local epidemic situation to inform the public health and operational health system response to COVID-19.”
Report co-author Professor Jodie McVernon from the Doherty Institute confirmed the mistake on two graphs.
“This error resulted from a single line in the code used to plot a graph, meaning that it showed the number of hospitalisations rather than the number of ICU bed admissions.”
