UK behind the curve in battling COVID-19

One of my long-time collaborators, Professor Philip Brown of the University of Kent at Canterbury, and two colleagues have written a letter in the Guardian in response to an article by statistician David Spiegelhalter that made the point that the data is too messy to draw any comparative conclusions about individual countries' responses.

The letter disputes this, and makes the point that more careful statistical modeling should be used to tease out effects of various interventions and demographic factors, and we don't need to "waive the white flag" because the data has complexities but rather should exercise our considerable modeling prowess to attack this problem.