Britain was too reliant on ‘very scary’ SAGE models to make decisions about going into lockdowns, Professor John Edmunds, the man behind some of those projections, has said.
Prof Edmunds said that Covid models were only meant to be ‘one component’ of decision making, but were relied upon too much by government ministers.
He also said that the health of the economy should also have been considered when the UK chose to lockdown from March 2020 onwards.
Prof Edmunds has accepted that the models failed to take into account the economic and knock-on health harms that Covid lockdowns caused, and the SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) member admitted that ‘in principle’, these potential harms could have been factored in, ‘but in practise they were not’.
His shock remarks come as people in the UK and Ireland navigate the difficult outcomes of a two-year-long shutdown of the economy and health service. The NHS is grappling with a backlog crisis that means 1 in 9 people in England are on an NHS waiting list for treatment, and inflation has reached its highest point in 3 decades.
In Ireland, new figures have revealed that 600,000 people are stuck on waiting lists for their first hospital outpatient consultation.
By the end of April, 624,773 people, including 86,940 children, were waiting for their first outpatient appointment, according to the HSE’s National Treatment Purchase Fund.
Over 140,000 people, including 12,090 children, have been waiting more than a year and a half for an outpatient appointment, according to the newly released figures.
‘ENORMOUS ECONOMIC IMPACT’ AND ‘HARM TO MENTAL HEALTH’
Prof Edmunds, an epidemiologist and one of the most outspoken members of SAGE, speaking at the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases annual conference, described the death projections in the model as ‘truly eye-watering’.
Addressing the medical conference in Athens on Tuesday, he admitted there were weaknesses inherent in the scientific models. He said: “The epidemiological model is only one component [of decision-making] and I wondered and I worried that we’d had too much weight”.
He added: “There is of course an enormous economic impact from many of the interventions and other indirect impacts on psychological health and so on. Now these in principle could be included but in practice they were not”.
In a sharply contrasting approach taken in summer 2020, Professor Edmunds called for the first lockdown to be extended, as he cautioned that Britain was “taking a risk” by opening up while still battling 8,000 Covid cases daily. He added that the decision to reopen was “clearly” political.
He also warned against easing the third national lockdown in early 2021, warning it would be a “disaster’” and would inflict “enormous pressure” on the health service. Prof Edmunds, one of the most prominent scientific voices when the first lockdown was imposed in March 2020, also previously blasted the Government for not going into lockdowns sooner and for lifting restrictions too quickly, including the scrapping of mandatory self-isolation.
On reflection, he said he now realises lockdown had an “enormous economic impact”, and was also harmful to mental health, with lockdowns meaning people unable to mix outside their household, schools were forced to close and working from home was made mandatory.
He said consideration of these risks was left out because the link between Covid cases and damage to the economy was ‘really unclear’.
He added that the social and psychological impact of the restrictions are “still not clear” and were “certainly not clear ahead of time,” stating: “So these things were not included. And I actually think in many respects it was a great failure of health economics to not really contribute to this field during the epidemic”.
Despite his insistence that such ramifications were unclear, dozens of scientists warned throughout the pandemic about the toll of lockdowns and restrictions on mental and physical health, as well as the economy.
‘VERY SCARY,’ ‘EYE-WATERING’ MODELS
Explaining the response to the first outbreak of Covid, he admitted that SAGE came up with “very scary” and “eye watering” results.
He said: “We looked at different interventions and came out with truly eye watering, very scary results, in terms of deaths, perhaps 300 to 4,000 [daily] deaths in the UK alone if we just let the epidemic run its course. That’s of course without changing behaviour.
“Probably, the individual would have changed their behaviour anyway. But huge numbers of deaths, huge numbers of intensive care beds usage”.
Professor Edmunds also admitted that questions remain around how much modelling was helpful in the UK’s initial response.
He said: “It certainly didn’t help us move very fast here and, in fact, I wonder whether because we had these tools and policymakers could ask us questions — “what about if we did this and what about if we did that” — that that might have actually contributed to us actually making a decision quite slowly.
“And in fact the speed of that lockdown was certainly the biggest contributing factor to total numbers of deaths in the first wave”.
MODELS UNDER FIRE
SAGE scientists have previously claimed their official projections never came to pass owing to behavioural changes among the population, who reduced their contacts when cases were on the rise, as well as high levels of immunity following Covid infection.
The models have been the target of criticism from other experts, who have criticised SAGE for failing to consult sociologists and economists when doing their modelling, meaning they failed to incorporate “things other people know about”.
Expert predictions have also been challenged in Ireland, and were often described as being unnecessarily pessimistic.
At Tuesday’s conference, Prof Edmunds noted that it is “not currently possible” to accurately take people’s behaviours into account in scientific models.
Professor Edmunds noted that SAGE modelling fails to include factors that are “unknowable at the time” – such as the severity of Omicron.
During the winter wave of Omicron, SAGE models did not account for the variant’s reduced severity, even though real-world data from South Africa showed that the strain caused milder illness.