The graph presented by chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance during Saturday’s press briefing suggested that, in the absence of a new lockdown, deaths from Covid-19 could reach 4,000 a day by Christmas. To put this scenario in context, deaths in the first wave back in April peaked at just over 1,000 a day.
Back in spring, a pre-publication copy of Neil Ferguson’s paper — the Imperial College modelling of Covid-19 deaths which sent Britain into the first lockdown — was released, so we could all see the assumptions and reasoning behind it. Saturday’s graph did not even reveal the source of the 4,000 deaths a day claim — although it has subsequently been revealed to be a Cambridge/Public Health England (PHE) estimate.
Now Daniel Howdon, a research fellow at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, and Carl Heneghan, professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, have discovered that the Cambridge-PHE graph dates from three weeks ago.
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