Lords’ S&T committee hears of data challenges and policy constraints on scientific modellers
The focus on the infection rate of coronavirus in the UK is a “distraction”, a scientist advising government on its response to the pandemic has said.
Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-M), was speaking during a House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on how modelling informed the UK’s response to Covid-19.
Asked about the focus in government Covid-19 briefings to the public on the R rate—which is the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to another on average, Woolhouse replied that it was a “distraction”.
“I’ve argued consistently for a long time now that to use a single measure as a metric to drive policy would be wrong,” he told peers on 2 June. “I don’t think it is being used as a single measure to drive policy, but the impression is out there that this is a particularly critical number.
“The original policy goals… have been to save lives, protect NHS staff, and reduce the burden on the NHS as a whole. ‘R’ has a loose and imprecise connection with any of those policy goals.”
Instead, he argued, “we should probably go back to old-fashioned public health and think in terms of risk”.
“What is the risk to an individual in this location at that time? Apart from anything else, that’s very helpful to the individual themselves to make any informed choices about how to behave.
“I’m not sure whether the ‘R’ number helps an individual to decide how to behave, but it certainly doesn’t help me.”
Woolhouse also spoke of the need for more comprehensive data on coronavirus cases, which he said should be broken down by categories such as geographic location, age group, risk group and occupation.
“It’s particularly important to get data in hospital and care homes—and this is starting to happen. But the data management systems we have in place through the NHS… are frankly very cumbersome indeed, and it has been difficult to extract the right data at the right time for the right person in the right place.”
Elsewhere in the session, Paul Birrell, a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge and fellow member of SPI-M, gave an insight into the group’s work and communication with policymakers.
“Groups that fit into SPI-M are academic groups—so they can pursue research agendas as they see fit,” he told peers. “But there are questions and modelling requirements that come down through Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies]—presumably from the Cabinet Office—which are then fed to SPI-M.”
These, he explained, are “usually modelling requests that have a very short turnaround time—typically two to three days and often over weekends”. As a result, “there isn’t often the wiggle room to address anything other than what is being particularly posed”.