Someone in the NZ media should ask Simon Thornley if the reason for his COVID skepticism is his past failures to accurately predict outbreaks. I haven’t mentioned this here before, but he keeps bringing up his ‘experience’. This is from a lit review by my student a few years ago

At the time it seemed like an honest but somewhat amateur attempt at modelling and data fitting. Nothing inherently wrong with that as we had a gap in expertise/activity in NZ in this area (imo). This is one reason we started trying ourselves around that time! And it is hard!

Thus my most charitable interpretation of his behaviour since then is that he became disillusioned by modelling because *he* got it badly wrong. That’s somewhat understandable, but now he has over-corrected and (imo) swung to full on denier/contrarian mode.

Journalists - feel free to ask him some questions along these lines

Another hot tip for interviewers - he very obviously (to those who are looking) switches between CFR and IFR when talking about early estimates and later estimates. Uses CFR when talking about early estimates and then switches to IFR when talking about them being lower ‘later on’

So in addition to asking about how well his past attempts at modelling have gone, ask him if he understands the difference between CFR and IFR and whether he’s surprised at how well early estimates have in fact held up

cc @jacktame for example