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This modeling is nothing new, outside experts pointed out that the report’s alarming conclusions — that the virus would overwhelm hospitals and that governments had no choice but to impose radical lockdown policies — had been made in previous reports on coronavirus or on social media sites devoted to the outbreak.
“A lot of it is not what they say, but who says it,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University. “Neil Ferguson has a huge amount of influence.”
Also, the situation in Italy and it's vivid images on social media made the consequences impossible to continue to ignore and or downplay.
Imperial College has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu. With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.
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