Thread by @Kit_Yates_Maths

From @chrischirp.bsky.social's excellent substack:

"The overall conclusion is that the scale of deaths in the first wave could have been much lower and the devastating second wave could have been largely avoided."



1/13christinapagel.substack.com/p/the-uk-covid…

@chrischirp "Tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented. Mod 2 report lays out the missed opportunities, delayed decisions, a refusal to learn, a downplaying or failure to believe advice from SAGE, and a general unseriousness on the part of government"

2/13covid19.public-inquiry.uk/documents/modu…

@chrischirp "Professor Edmunds, who served on the SAGE modelling subgroup Spi-M, testified that the failure to act to control the second wave “was not because of a lack of situational awareness or knowledge of how to control it. We let this second wave happen.”"
3/13

@chrischirp "Professor McLean, now the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor, described it as the worst period of pandemic, saying:

“We could see what was coming and could not understand why the government did not act upon the science advice by introducing effective interventions”"
4/13

@chrischirp "This isn’t speaking with the luxury of hindsight - witness after witness testified that SAGE was warning what was coming at the time. And it wasn’t just SAGE."

5/13

@chrischirp "The Academy of Medical Sciences published a detailed report in July 2020 (shared with the government via SAGE) on the need to prepare for a challenging winter, including advice on NHS resilience, contact tracing, and public health mitigations."


6/13acmedsci.ac.uk/file-download/…

@chrischirp "Indie SAGE too published many reports that summer and autumn, on how to make contact tracing more effective, on how to improve testing, on safer return to work and study, the need to support people isolating."


7/13independentsage.org/report/final-r…

@chrischirp "We highlighted the urgency of what was happening in the lead up to Christmas 2020 as things were spiralling out of control, and called for an emergency national lockdown almost two weeks before the government acted."


8/13independentsage.org/rethinking-chr…

@chrischirp "So it is not simply that mistakes were made under pressure; it is that failing to prepare over the spring and summer of 2020 and then to act quickly as the situation worsened transferred risk and suffering onto hospitals, staff, patients and families."

9/13

@chrischirp "What makes it even more tragic is that the UK was the first country in the world to start vaccinating people - in early December just as the second wave was turbocharged by the new alpha variant."


10/13nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k…

@chrischirp "Our vaccine rollout was phenomenal - by mid-March 2021, over 25 million people had received at least one dose of Covid vaccine, which included over 95% of all adults over 65 years old."

11/13gov.uk/government/new…

@chrischirp "Early evidence was that even one dose reduced the chance of death by over 80% in older adults.

Imagine the lives that could have been saved had we managed to delay the next wave until after our population was vaccinated."
12/13

@chrischirp I would have posted more of the substack because it’s so good, but I you’ll have to go and read it for yourself.



13/13christinapagel.substack.com/p/the-uk-covid…