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Neil Ferguson says policymakers didn’t think we were going to see the reasonable worst case
Some of the scientists modelling the coronavirus epidemic in the UK have admitted the country was more badly affected than they had originally anticipated.
Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London and former member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said scientists learned in early March that the UK “had been much more heavily affected than we had previously anticipated”, and that the country would in fact have “one of the largest epidemics in Europe”.
“Going forward, what the models say is that we had limited room for manoeuvre, that this is a highly transmissible pathogen,” he told a 2 June House of Lords Science and Technology Committee hearing on how modelling informed the UK’s response to Covid-19.
During the evidence session, Ferguson also suggested there was a disconnect between policymakers and scientists in the interpretation of the modelling data.
“The challenge we had in early March,” he said, “…was we ended up with a reasonable worst-case scenario, which in my view was very close to the best estimate of what would happen, and that can lead to a slight disconnect in thinking.”
In terms of policymaking, he said “there was a view that this is the reasonable worst case we are not going to see”, whereas he wasn’t “quite so sanguine about that”.
Also giving evidence, Matt Keeling, a professor of mathematics and life sciences at the University of Warwick, said it was unclear in the early stages of the outbreak in China whether the UK was heading for an epidemic on a similar scale, describing the situation in Italy as “the big eye-opener”.
“But it was a gradual refinement rather than a eureka process,” he said.
Keeling also indicated that modellers did not adequately predict the large number of deaths in UK care homes and hospitals. “Maybe that’s one of the areas where modellers did drop the ball,” he said.
“Maybe with hindsight we could have modelled those early on and thought about the impacts there, but considering the amount of information we had at the time… models offer our best estimates of what could happen in the short term,” he said. “Long-term predictions are much more difficult.”
Asked about the differences in approaches between the UK and Sweden, Ferguson said it was “interesting” that the Nordic country managed to control the virus without a full lockdown.
“It’s clear there has been significant social distancing in Sweden, and our best estimate is that that has led to a reduction in the reproduction number of around one.”
Nevertheless, he said policy decisions taken in the country were “based really on quite similar science”.
Keeling added that the policy decisions based on scientific data were an “interpretation and really a value judgment of what you believe is going to happen in the future”.