Sunetra Gupta

Sunetra Gupta is professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, university of Oxford.

Saturday

Sunetra Gupta

LIVE: The Spectator’s Alternative Covid Inquiry

From our UK edition

53 min listen

As the official Covid Inquiry comes to an end, the Spectator has convened a panel of our own experts to ask the questions that the Inquiry didn’t – or wouldn’t – answer. The Spectator’s commissioning editor Lara Brown is joined by science writer and Conservative peer Matt Ridley, Oxford professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption, journalist Christopher Snowdon and science writer Tom Whipple. This is a condensed version of the event. Subscribers can access the full event via Spectator TV and you can find more events from the Spectator here.

LIVE: The Spectator’s Alternative Covid Inquiry

Saturday

Sunetra Gupta

On Sage’s Covid models

From our UK edition

In the confusion that has arisen from the demonstrable inability of a certain type of mathematical model to predict the time course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many have taken to reciting – with a variable mixture of glee and sympathy – that ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’. I have never been comfortable with this statement (it doesn’t really deserve to be called an aphorism) and even less so the smugness with which it is typically pronounced. One might as well say all metaphors are wrong but some are useful. ‘Wrong’ seems to be employed here to suggest that ‘statistical or scientific models always fall short of the complexities of reality (but can still be useful nonetheless)’.