The recriminations and defensive positioning were certainly in evidence during the part of the committee questioning of Whitty that I transcribed. And other bits too, but it was too time consuming to do more than I did. There was one bit where he went out of his way to make it clear that vaccinations were the only context in which he would go on about herd immunity, for example. Anyway, the bit I transcribed, from earlier today:
Jeremy Hunt:
On the 5th of March professor Whitty you told the health select committee that it was important not to lockdown too early. And I just wondered, did you continue to advise that we should not be locking down right up until 24th March when we did do our national lockdown?
Whitty:
Well I think that well firstly the answer is no. Secondly what we did, and I think its, you know people kind of have again a rather 'theres a pre lockdown stage and theres just lockdown' - actually multiple things happened in stages all the way through that month. As SAGE advised that different things are brought in, starting with the ones that have big impacts but almost no negative downsides. People may laugh at things like washing hands, actually they work a lot more effectively than many of the more draconian measures that people think of. But the first of those was individual isolation followed by household isolation and shielding, then into strong recommendations about people working from home, and then on into closing schools, pubs and clubs and so on and then onto final lockdown. There were various points along the way, each one of which was advised by SAGE that that was the thing to do. And the difficult question with this was firstly what is the right combination to do, and the second was what is the exact timing by which this should happen?
And I note in the last week that I am my colleagues have been berated by one set of professors in one newspaper for going too late, and another professor in another newspaper for doing too much too early. And in reality we will in due course have to go back and look over this and say exactly whats the best way to do this, sort of have to do a post-action review and say exactly how do we do this. But what we did was we did this phased, staged approach all the way through basically March, from quite early on in March, through to final lockdown on the 23rd.
Hunt:
So I suppose my last question on this, chair if I may, is the thing I think that is difficult to understand is that on that point on the 24th of March, the analysis showed that the number of people with the disease was doubling every 5 days. So if you had done that two weeks earlier you would potentially have more than halved the number of people who got the disease and I just wondered what the rationale was for not going a bit earlier with the heavier measures, given what we saw came later?
Whitty:
Well I think this is one of the ones where I can give an incredibly long answer that will take the rest of this session, going through the discussions that were in SAGE. I think this is an area where it is unbelievably easy to be facile if I'm honest, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but I'm just saying some of the commentary in the press, you think, actually, have you thought this through? And to go back for example to the previous question about 'have you thought through the downsides of a lockdown too early', just in narrow health terms, leaving aside anything else. Getting this right, between going too early and going too late was a very difficult judgement call. This thing moved actually very fast, you talked about a doubling time of 5 days, actually by the time that it was moving quickly in the UK it was in fact shorter than that, so it moved really quite quickly. There was a point at, you know, the path that was followed was one we were predicting. The speed of upswing was a bit faster than I would have predicted if I'd been asked on the 5th March, not by a huge amount but by enough to be appreciable. And I think thats clear from SAGE, I think even SAGE datas already out there, it will be from other ones. The difference was one of a relatively small degree, on this, in that window of time between early March and late March. And this will be gone upon over multiple times but I think that the end of the epidemic is the time frankly to do this properly and in a technical way and in a non-partisan way.
www.theguardian.com
since I was chatting about a possible return to Civil Service work, involving, perhaps, testing and tracing and related data processing. Rumours had genuinely reached me .....
] has been circulating that traffic light thing for more than a week now
Particularly with dates.
towardsdatascience.com
