Scientists tell of government’s unresponsiveness on Covid-19 and of modellers getting it wrong
Francis Crick director Paul Nurse has said his offer of carrying out 2,000 coronavirus tests a day was never taken up by the government. He made the comment in a documentary that saw several prominent scientists criticise the government for being too slow to respond to their advice and offers of help.
Channel 4’s documentary, Coronavirus: Did the Government Get It Wrong?, also heard modellers acknowledge that they underestimated the scale of the Covid-19 epidemic in the UK in February and early March.
The documentary, shown on 3 June, heard that at a meeting held on 9 March at the Department of Health, scientific advisers realised that the situation was worse than they thought.
“The cases were growing much faster than we thought,” said Daniela De Angelis, biostatistician at the University of Cambridge and a member of government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling.
The chair of the SPI-M group, infectious disease modeller Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “During the meeting one of the members said: ‘Do you know what, we’ve got this wrong’. And [they] managed to convince us that in fact we were further into epidemic than we had thought. That was alarming.”
But the advisers and scientists suggested that the government was not acting on scientific advice fast enough to prepare capacities to deal with the virus or to introduce a lockdown.
“I’ve difficulty understanding why for example they weren’t even at pretty early stage talking about really, really stepping up testing to try and find out where the virus was,” said Gabriel Scully, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine.
The programme heard of large research laboratories offering to help with testing only to be ignored by the government.
Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick institute, said his offer of 2,000 tests a day was never taken up by government.
“I’ve talked to quite a number of different people, from minister levels and also advisers, and it’s like talking to a blancmange really, I mean you sort of poke it and it wobbles for a while and then more or less goes back to the original shape it had.”
Meanwhile, Matthew Freeman, head of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford said: “Several of us here started writing emails saying ‘Hey guys can we help?’ You know, ‘We’re here, we can do this, it’s clear that you don’t have capacity yet to do so’ and it was sort of either ‘We’ll get back to you’ or ‘Why don’t you contact somebody else’.”
“The problem started with the failure to have proper planning in place to get going and ever since then we’re trying to play catch up,” Nurse concluded.