assumed all businesses stayed open, along with theaters, malls, restaurants, spas, gyms, stadiums, arenas, parks, concert halls, etc. At least for the U.K. It also assumed 25% of universities kept operating as usual. The only things it really shut down were schools, and it had some quarantining of the over-70 crowd. In other words, it didn’t come close to modeling the lockdowns, sports league cancellations, shelter-in-place, WFH, etc that have actually occurred.
I will say though that I didn’t see any US projections in the study, and maybe he didn’t model the US very well. I don’t know what he assumed or how he modeled the US. The study I read modeled the U.K., and nothing he said yesterday or today seems inconsistent with his model. The change in deaths simply reflected moving from the “do-nothing” scenario he had modeled to a lock-down scenario more stringent than anything he modeled in his paper.