It was only four weeks ago that Boris Johnson plunged Britain into a second lockdown. The Prime Minister, flanked by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, said that he could not ignore the modelling. Deaths, the Prime Minister explained, could reach ‘several thousand a day’, with a ‘peak of mortality’ worse than April. ‘Doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would get oxygen and who wouldn’t, who would live and who would die,’ he warned.
Today, however, with the country about to enter a new, tougher tiered system, the latest figures raise serious questions over those claims – and consequently, the need for a second lockdown.
Since March, I’ve been running the ZOE app assisted by King’s College London to predict the number of Covid cases across the UK. Over a million people use it to report any symptoms they might have on a weekly basis and from there we set about analysing the data.
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