You can always rely on Auntie for an inane headline.
Coronavirus: Waning immunity and rising cases – time to worry?
The answer to which is…
Immunity through vaccination was always expected to wane.
The vaccines do not give immunity, they mitigate symptoms. Ergo, they are not vaccines in the conventional sense.
Instead, the modellers predicted…
Yeah, stopped reading at that point.
They are just loving it aren’t they? You can tell that they hate us by the fact that they are salivating at the very thought of more of us dying. Presumably computer models can be useful in cases where there are few variables and that those variables are within narrow and known parameters. It is really obvious that the number and width of the variables involved in modeling the spread of a virus render the models useless.
Computer models can be incredibly useful…
…in mechanical engineering. We use them all the time to determine stresses and deflections in structures, velocities and behaviours of fluid flows and things like expected lifespan of a component.
They are useful because mechanical properties of materials and their behaviours are well understood and change in a predictable way
The models used to “predict” the virus could easily be seen to be useless as soon as they were presented. I remember one having multiple orders of magnitude difference between the best and worst case, which is no good. Might as well say “some or more may die”. Would be just as accurate.
I remember reading that Computer Aided Design had reached such a level that the Triumph 675 Daytona went from the prototype stage to full production without any modifications. Not quite perfect because early production versions had a problem with burning oil. I can’t think that Triumph are the only company that have taken CAD to that level of refinement.
I remember the Virgin F1 team thought that CFD meant they wouldn’t need a windtunnel, amongst other things. Fell flat on their arses. Of the three teams which joined the series in 2010, they were otherwise the best-prepared, being run by the respected Manor Motorsport organisation, and in fairness they eventually dragged themselves off the ground (once they admitted the “all digital” plan was a bust) to outlive the other two and become the only one ever to score any points at all.
But it was an important lesson for everyone: a common theme in F1 over the last twenty years or so has been highly successful or promising teams suddenly finding themselves in trouble due to “calibration issues”, i.e., their simulation data – windtunnels, CFD, etc. – doesn’t correspond to what they’re seeing in the real world, and often they don’t know why.
Relying on modelling without checking it against observed real-world data is idiotic.