Thread by @alexwickham

NEW: The UK only realised "in the last few days" that attempts to "mitigate" the coronavirus pandemic would not work, and that it needed to shift to a strategy to "suppress", according to a report by a team of experts who have been advising the government

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The Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team has been advising SAGE

It found from new data that mitigation would "likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over"

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Revised modelling from new NHS data and Italy showed a mitigation strategy would surpass NHS emergency surge capacity by as much as eight times, leading to 250,000 deaths in Britain

"In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days"

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"We were expecting herd immunity to build. We now realise it’s not possible to cope with that," said Professor Azra Ghani, chair of infectious diseases epidemiology at Imperial (h/t @whippletom)

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@whippletom As a result, the report — which its authors said had "informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks" — said: "We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time."

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A suppression strategy requires "a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members", and "may need to be supplemented by school and university closures"

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An "intensive intervention package" will have "maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more)", the report said, painting an extraordinary picture of what life could be like in the UK for the next year and a half

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Here is the UK government response to this story: buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/co…