How Britain (narrowly) avoided lockdown last Christmas

Exactly a year ago today, the cabinet met to decide whether or not to lock down to tackle Omicron. At the time, published Sage documents had outlined a range of 600 to 6,000 daily deaths unless more action was taken. Recalling the anniversary, I had an interesting exchange with Graham Medley, who chaired the SPI-M modelling committee that fed into Sage. ‘We obviously made sure that the people we were talking to did understand,’ he told me.

That raises the prospect that a subset of people may have been briefed that Sage was discarding real-world South African data on the mildness of Omicron – so its ‘scenarios’ could bear no resemblance to reality. As proved to be the case. But this did mean that Britain was very nearly locked down for a fourth time on the strength of ‘scenarios’ that even the authors may not have regarded as credible. 

‘Who knew or understood what, and when, is likely to be the main point of the inquiry,’ Professor Medley added.