I recall some common sense from the Government’s Chief scientific officer, who said earlier this year that “we have to learn to live with Covid”. Well, whatever happened to that?
The Government continues to be in thrall to scientific modellers with doomsday predictions.The value of the output from any model -however robust its design- depends upon the assumptions that are fed into it. Some of the terrifying numbers from the modelling that we have seen in the last few days are the result of assumptions that take no account of the data that is coming out of South Africa -that the new variant, despite being more infectious, appears to be milder and consequent hospitalisations fewer and shorter. Many of the alarming numbers aren’t even the output of models at all, they are mere extrapolations: assuming that what has happened, will go on happening at the same rate, irrespective of experience that things rarely do so.
As I said in the Commons at the beginning of last week, this is all part of a ‘Ministry of Fear’ designed to ensure our compliance with instructions that compromise fundamental liberties, and indeed, condition us to demand even greater restraints on that liberty, so overawed are we by the present danger.Part of this work of terrorising the population is undertaken with enthusiasm by the broadcast media, a job made so much easier by the twenty four hour news cycle which enables us to constantly receive the same bad news throughout the day from the moment that we wake up in the morning, hearing on the radio that we’d die horribly drowning in our own phlegm, repeated until the moment we go to bed.What is astounding is that, as each new prediction is trotted out, no account is taken of the previous record of the source. Let’s take, for example, one of the media’s favourite modellers, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.In 2001, Professor Ferguson predicted 150,000 human deaths from foot-and-mouth; but under 200 died. In 2002, he predicted up to 50,000 deaths from BSE; in the end, 177 died. In 2005, he said that 150 million people could be killed by bird flu; 282 died. In 2009, a Government estimate based on his advice said that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths; in the end, 457 people died. He predicted 85,000 Covid deaths in Sweden consequent on their policy of avoiding lockdown; in fact, 6,000 Swedes have died. In July this year he predicted that 100,000 daily cases was almost inevitable following our release from restrictions. It just didn’t happen.Yet the broadcasters will quote the latest models as if they were the Gospel truth.My prejudice is that the latest scare won’t be anything like as bad forecast. We look to ministers to resist the measures being urged upon them which will damage society and the economy, but then, on the basis of past performance that expectation looks pretty shaky too.