Nafeez Ahmed reveals how outside pressure weighed on SAGE to prioritise ‘supply chains’, the ‘wider economy’, ‘workforce’ and ‘business’
Documents published by the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) throw light on how overarching concerns about the economy derailed efforts to suppress the Coronavirus, resulting in a worst-of-all-worlds scenario: maximum fatality rates combined with the worst economic performance.
One of the most consistent themes that emerges from the minutes of SAGE meetings is how the Government repeatedly expected its scientists to account for the economic impact of lockdown restrictions – even though SAGE was not doing any economic modelling.
The minutes reveal that economic modelling of the potential consequences of social distancing measures was being conducted by other Government departments such as the Treasury and the Actuary’s Department.
This evidence emerges in the context of a Government decision, from the outset, to refuse to consider the goal of suppressing the Coronavirus as a viable option.
Avoiding the Inevitable
The SAGE minutes confirm that the Government at no time considered attempting to prevent the Coronavirus from becoming endemic in the UK. They also show how social distancing measures were constantly and repeatedly pitted against economic considerations.
In fact, on 3 February, the main concern was protecting UK “supply chains” rather than enforcing early restrictions that could have helped to prevent the virus from entering the country.
The SAGE minutes at the time said that preventing “imported infections” would have required “draconian and coordinated measures” at the border and that “stopping travel would also have other impacts, including on supply chains”.
Almost all social distancing measures that were later adopted were dismissed out of hand.
The minutes show that SAGE had assumed that reducing imported infections by more than 95% would only delay the onset of the epidemic in the UK by about a month, rather than preventing the bulk of it. But this assumption was false and at odds with progress being made elsewhere.
While the UK was refusing to close borders over fears about “supply chains”, other countries such as New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore were doing the opposite and successfully managed to suppress the virus within a shorter time-frame.
The next day, the Government’s scientific advisors seemed to agree that the spread of COVID-19 in the UK would be inevitable and that the focus was not to prevent this spread, but to merely “delay” it in order to improve “NHS readiness and ability to handle cases”.
Meanwhile, almost all social distancing measures that were later adopted were dismissed out of hand. School closures, the banning of public gatherings, shutting down public transport and other measures were described as “probably relatively ineffective”.
But the SAGE documents suggest that this dismissal was less the result of science and more from being compelled by the Government to consider economic factors.
No Social Distancing Modelling
Earlier released SAGE documents relating to school closures showed that SAGE had put forward ample evidence of their effectiveness based on preliminary literature reviews of existing scientific literature.
Early action, it was acknowledged, could potentially reduce an epidemic by as much as 60%. But, somehow, this data ended up being filtered out of SAGE’s final recommendations to the Government.
The SAGE minutes suggest that this was because of the constant insistence from the Government that the “economic consequences” of such social distancing measures needed to be accounted for. SAGE had also never been requested by the Government to do specific modelling of social distancing measures until much later.
Given the Government’s reliance on modelling to formulate its strategy, the failure to have detailed modelling in place for social distancing strategies three months into the crisis is damning and suggests that such preventive measures had not been given serious consideration.
As the journalist Stefan Simonowitz has observed, “the failure to do epidemiological modelling for lockdown until mid-March” meant that the Government had guaranteed it would not receive “any alternative ‘design options’”.