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SAGE and the UKHSA have decided to stop issuing updates on the R rate or to release modelling projecting death and hospitalisation numbers from Covid. The Telegraph has more.
The move is understood to be part of the Government’s normalisation of COVID-19 in society and desire to treat the coronavirus in the same way as other viruses, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or flu, as the UK moves away from the now culturally ingrained hyper-awareness of epidemiological fluctuations.
Modelling and the role it played in how decisions were made by the Government will likely feature in the Covid inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett, which will resume in February.
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the UKHSA have been producing Covid models and projections for almost three years which have been integral to policy decisions.
“[The UKHSA] took over the medium-term projections and R estimates some time earlier this year,” Prof John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and long-serving scientific pandemic influenza modelling group (SPI-M) member, told the Telegraph.
The final document providing Covid modelling information will be on Jan 6th, 2023, almost three years after government scientific advisers first convened in an “extraordinary meeting” on Jan 13th, 2020 to discuss the emergence of the “Wuhan novel coronavirus”.
Risk to the U.K. population was said to be “very low” at the time but, by March 2020 the U.K. was in lockdown and SAGE was meeting regularly with modelling a central component of the Government response.
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