Did Australia get it all wrong?
- "I don't think you've got it all wrong, but you've painted yourself into a corner and I'm watching with interest how you and one hundred other countries will climb out of the lockdown. Because I don't think any government that I know has given a minute's thought about how they would get out of the different lockdowns that are installed. Take school closures for example. If you close the schools, when are you going to open them? What's your criteria? I don't think anyone thought about that when the closure was decided on."
Why did you predict that the results will be similar across most countries regardless of the approach taken?
- "What we're seeing is a tsunami of a rather mild infection spreading around the globe, and I think there's very little chance to stop it by any measure we take. Most people will become infected by this and most won't even notice. We have data now from Sweden that shows that between 98 and 99% of the cases have had a very mild infection or didn't even realize they were infected...[The fatality rate is] around 0.1%...I think it's a bit higher [than the rate for ordinary flu]. I had said before in Sweden that this is like a severe influenza; I don't think that's completely true. It will be a bit more severe than influenza - maybe double, but not tenfold."
What about Imperial College/Neil Ferguson's flawed modelling, which predicted half a million deaths here in the UK?
-
"It's fascinating how it changed the policy of the world. I mean the United Kingdom made a U-turn overnight... There are several other mistakes with the paper but it gets very technical." These were the three main flaws in the Imperial paper according to Giesecke:
-
The paper was never published, which is contrary to normal scientific behavior
-
It was never peer reviewed; it was more like an internal departmental communication, a memo
-
The big mistake of the Imperial group was estimating the number, the proportion, of very mild cases that would never be detected
-
What is the Swedish coronavirus policy?
-
"The Swedish model has sort of two pillars.
-
One is only use measures that are evidence-based. And there are two that are evidence-based: one is [that] washing hands is good, we've known that for 150 years, since Semmelweis in Austria a long time ago;
-
the other is social distancing - if you don't get too close to other people they won't infect you.
-
And the third may be trust people - people are not stupid! If you tell them what's good for them, they will do what you say. You don't need this soldiers in the street, and police - it's unnecessary."
-
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2TEOnOnHVM