UK pivoted to lockdown just as public health authorities downgraded COVID-19 threat

As many Western Nations continue to suffer under lockdown, the decisions to shut down the economies in the U.K. and U.S. are undergoing some skeptical reevaluation.

The shutdowns on both sides of the Atlantic were largely driven by a computer model developed by Imperial College epidemiologist Neil Ferguson that predicted over half a million fatalities in the U.K. and 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. without state intervention. 

A recent opinion article in the Daily Telegraph now pans that modeling as “the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.”

The article’s authors, software developers David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik, write that the Imperial model “is vulnerable to producing wildly different and conflicting outputs based on the same initial set of parameters. … Run it on different computers and you would likely get different results. In other words, it is non-deterministic.”

Just last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson referred again to Ferguson’s report as he explained the need for continuing his government’s lockdown restrictions.

Ferguson first presented his findings in Downing St. on March 16. One week later, Johnson announced the U.K. was going into lockdown.

Yet, the very same week, on March 19, the British government’s main information website, gov.uk, posted an announcement seemingly at odds with the prime minister's pivot to a sweeping and strict new lockdown policy: “COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID).” 

This discordant view was also shared by the government’s influential Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP). 

The HCID classification is reserved for diseases with generally severe symptoms and high mortality rates that, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, pose “serious human health threats.” 

In Britain, the authoritative, official list of HCIDs is jointly agreed by Public Health England and NHS England. The British list, which includes Ebola, Lassa fever, SARS, MERS and Avian (bird) flu, identifies these criteria for a high consequence infectious disease: 

• an acute infectious disease
• typically has a high case-fatality rate
• may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment
• often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
• has the ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
• requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely

COVID-19 was added to the British list in January 2020, based on fragmentary early reports about the disease. By March — and before Johnson announced the U.K. lockdown — the disease was downgraded and removed from the list as mortality rates proved far lower than initially feared, clinical awareness grew, and the availability of a sensitive test expanded.

Another influential body to initially downplay the threat posed by this coronavirus was the European monitoring of excess mortality (EuroMOMO). On March 15, in a since-removed web bulletin, it stated, “Pooled estimates of all-cause mortality show, overall, normal expected levels in the participating countries; however, increased excess mortality is notable in Italy.” 

The World Health Organisation’s website even stated at the time, “influenza can spread faster than COVID-19.” 

When questioned by a journalist if downgrading COVID-19 challenged the need for the lockdown, the U.K. Department for Health offered: “HCID is a technical classification with no current implications on how the government is responding to the coronavirus outbreak.” 

Until Ferguson presented his findings, the government had been following the “herd immunity” approach proposed by the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, which included keeping schools open. (Although British Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, was then already arguing for more stringent measures). 

In protest, hundreds of scientists signed an influential letter claiming the government’s prevailing approach would overstress the National Health Service and "risk many more lives than necessary."

However, many of the signers were “drawn from mathematics rather than medicine with very few specialists in infection control and no leading experts in the spread of disease,” Sky News reported at the time. 

“Not all of the academics who have signed the letter are scientists and there are also a number of PHD students on the list of signatories,”  added the British news channel. 

When the Imperial College report was published, the U.K. and U.S. were at the beginning of their infection cycles, and cases were still increasing rapidly. Ferguson premised his predictions on this trend continuing exponentially and argued both governments needed to take immediate and drastic action. 

His alarmist views prevailed over the HCID assessment, yet even as late as March 26,  Public Health England was claiming, “In week 12, 2020, no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality was observed overall in England.” 

According to Worldometer figures, as of May 22, U.K. deaths total 36,393. But as some jurisdictions are discovering, when mortality statistics more precisely differentiate between “dying from” COVID-19 and “dying with” the disease, the death toll may drop dramatically.  

As the U.K. prepares for more of life under lockdown, a new report has been circulated by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford suggesting the nation’s emergency may already be over. 

Compiled jointly with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Manchester University, this report claims infection rates are now so low, at 24 per 1000, that the virus is far below the level classified as an epidemic, which is 40 per 1000.