To the question why has Germany had so many fewer deaths from Covid-19 compared with Britain, the Observer usually has only one answer. As the title to an investigation in today’s paper puts it: ‘How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus’. Yet buried deep down in an interview in the very same paper, comes an alternative insight, and one which, remarkably, does not involve the Tories in any way.
The paper carries an interview with Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at UCL who has been advising SAGE, the government’s scientific committee. In it, he explains how he has been using dynamic casual modelling – a mathematical technique developed to predict activity in the brain – to analyse the Covid-19 epidemic. He says how his method predicted that hospital admissions would peak on 5 April and deaths on 10 April, within a couple of days of what they really did peak.
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