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  This lockdown debate is interesting and has obviously engendered some strong opinions!
  
  There is a lot of cynicism in IT circles about the worth of Imperial College's code (Ferguson - whose predictions precipitated lockdown and is now 'off games'). Eyes would glaze over if I linked the relevant articles but here's a management summary from just one:-
  
  "All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
  
  On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves."
  
  So WGS's views have some sympathy amongst the technical fraternity. That said, it is surely undeniable that this wretched virus is passed by contact with infected droplets from one human to another, either by air transmission or via a conduit. e.g. a door handle, a light switch and so on ad nauseam. Droplets passed through the air are, of course, the largest single method of transmission.
  
  Common sense therefore dictates that this lockdown will have saved lives. To what extent it has done so is a matter of academic debate.

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