The Covid Inquiry is exposing lockdown’s dodgy models

Did we lock down on a false premise? Yesterday was Ben Warner’s turn at the Covid Inquiry. He was an adviser, and one of the ‘tech bros’ brought in by Dominic Cummings to advise No. 10 on data. He was present at many of the early Sage – and other – meetings where the government’s established mitigation (herd immunity) plan was switched to the suppression (lockdown) strategy. 

In Cummings’s evidence to the inquiry last week, he said that models didn’t play a big part in moving the government towards lockdown. Part of the written inquiry evidence supplied by his data man, Ben Warner’s, supports that too. The inquiry KC was keen to highlight this early on and flashed it up on screen: ‘It is not necessary to perform large scale simulations of an epidemic to understand the main effects of a mitigation versus a suppression strategy. Simple calculations allow for reasonable approximations of the outcome.’ Those