Covid and the difficulty with ‘following the science’

Did anyone fancy being in Boris Johnson’s shoes before he made the decision to delay the full lifting of Covid restrictions? Keir Starmer, perhaps. But even Starmer might have preferred opposition if he had read the latest paper by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) committee, which will have informed the Prime Minister’s decision. It reinforces just how difficult it is for any government to ‘follow the science’. If you can sum the paper up in one sentence it would be ‘sorry, but we really don’t have much of a clue as to what will happen’.

Here are just a couple of highlights: ‘The scale of this resurgence is highly uncertain, and it could be either considerably smaller or larger than previous waves’ and ‘R is estimated to be 40-80 per cent higher for delta than for alpha, although a figure higher or lower than this cannot be ruled out.’

When there is such a wide range of uncertainties in the input data, there is inevitably going to be an even greater range of possibilities spewed out by the models.