Simon Clarke

The dangers of knee-jerk lockdown scepticism

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

From the very start of the pandemic, modelling projections and empirical data have been twisted to suit different agendas. Fanatics on both sides of the debate have cherry-picked data — whether those demanding tougher restrictions or those on the other side who believe that the virus is harmless and that this is all big fuss over nothing. Cold, detached analysis was an early victim of Covid-19.

And so it proved yet again after the Prime Minister’s press conference last Saturday, during which a number of projections were presented showing how the Covid-19 death toll could proceed in the coming weeks. A number of models were used to justify placing England into a second lockdown. One, in particular (produced by the University of Cambridge and Public Health England), however, set a hare running across the media and enraged libertarian MPs, eager to believe we’re being hoodwinked into an unnecessary lockdown. Undoubtedly, it was a huge presentational error that needlessly ruined the government’s messaging. The UK Statistics Authority has issued a warning, saying the graph had ‘potential to confuse the public and undermine confidence in the statistics’. But for lockdown sceptics, however, it was manna from heaven; they were gifted fresh ammunition.

The fuss over the differing models concealed their basic common denominator: that the conclusions of all of them were dire, it was just that some were more dire than others.

We know that the ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’, which the government uses to plan its responses to the pandemic, has already been met in terms of the number of Covid deaths and has been breached in terms of the hospital admissions. Unfortunately, what this worst-case scenario means, in reality, remains opaque; the government won’t tell us. But leaked documents published in The Spectator show Sage’s worst-case scenario points to 85,000 deaths by the end of March.

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