RugbyRebels

Eugene Wrayburn wrote:

Digby wrote:

Digby wrote:Coming up on Radio 4 at 9am this morning, just under 10 minutes from now, More or Less will be considering amongst other things whether the government is conducting 100,000 tests a day. Which might prove interesting, though I am biased as I think it one of the outstanding programmes put out by the BBC (it'll be available online for anyone unable to catch it live)

Please note if you're a fan of Brexit or Corbyn (either Piers or Jeremy) you might not like More or Less given it's a fact based programme rather than a belief based one

Some interesting stuff in there, and not just on the testing but also around the timing of the shutdown and how one thinks about that and the numbers who've died Vs Germany in particular.

Though actually on the testing with the government claiming a daily test number that's consistently now going over 100,000 (around 120-230k some days) they note if one wanted to talk about the number of diagnostic tests done at a patient level you could quite reasonably talk about a daily number much closer to 45k, some will no doubt have spotted that a very different number to the one Hancock and company are claiming

I'm a More or Less fanboy. I would make it mandatory listening if I ruled the world.

Yes the claiming of tests that have been posted out is bad enough but the other swizzes of saying "Ah but we swabbed a nose and throat so that's 2 tests" and the non-diagnostic research tests is outrageous.

I was quite shocked to hear that the timing iof the lockdown was quite so influential. Maybe test and trace is absolutely pointless until you've got infections down in the tens.

Banquo wrote:

Eugene Wrayburn wrote:

Digby wrote:
Some interesting stuff in there, and not just on the testing but also around the timing of the shutdown and how one thinks about that and the numbers who've died Vs Germany in particular.

Though actually on the testing with the government claiming a daily test number that's consistently now going over 100,000 (around 120-230k some days) they note if one wanted to talk about the number of diagnostic tests done at a patient level you could quite reasonably talk about a daily number much closer to 45k, some will no doubt have spotted that a very different number to the one Hancock and company are claiming

I'm a More or Less fanboy. I would make it mandatory listening if I ruled the world.

Yes the claiming of tests that have been posted out is bad enough but the other swizzes of saying "Ah but we swabbed a nose and throat so that's 2 tests" and the non-diagnostic research tests is outrageous.

I was quite shocked to hear that the timing iof the lockdown was quite so influential. Maybe test and trace is absolutely pointless until you've got infections down in the tens.

Can you summarise- didn't catch the show?

Digby wrote:

Banquo wrote:

Eugene Wrayburn wrote: I'm a More or Less fanboy. I would make it mandatory listening if I ruled the world.

Yes the claiming of tests that have been posted out is bad enough but the other swizzes of saying "Ah but we swabbed a nose and throat so that's 2 tests" and the non-diagnostic research tests is outrageous.

I was quite shocked to hear that the timing iof the lockdown was quite so influential. Maybe test and trace is absolutely pointless until you've got infections down in the tens.

Can you summarise- didn't catch the show?

The timing was basically saying we've largely compared lockdowns on a human calendar, and so we can cite we locked down at the same time as Germany. But we had more cases by the time we shut down and a virus knows little of a human calendar. Basically if we'd shut down one week earlier we'd have now have been around 1/4 of the deaths we've faced


ETA - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j949

Digby wrote:

Banquo wrote:

Eugene Wrayburn wrote: I'm a More or Less fanboy. I would make it mandatory listening if I ruled the world.

Yes the claiming of tests that have been posted out is bad enough but the other swizzes of saying "Ah but we swabbed a nose and throat so that's 2 tests" and the non-diagnostic research tests is outrageous.

I was quite shocked to hear that the timing iof the lockdown was quite so influential. Maybe test and trace is absolutely pointless until you've got infections down in the tens.

Can you summarise- didn't catch the show?

The timing was basically saying we've largely compared lockdowns on a human calendar, and so we can cite we locked down at the same time as Germany. But we had more cases by the time we shut down and a virus knows little of a human calendar. Basically if we'd shut down one week earlier we'd have now have been around 1/4 of the deaths we've faced


ETA - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j949

Donny osmond wrote:

cashead wrote:Sweden's got the highest death rate per capita.

I guess that's one way to mitigate the second wave they're expecting - leave no one around to catch it a second time.

6.08 deaths per million. Yes, there "won't be anyone around to catch it second time" is true if you can make 999,993.92 = 0.

That's some Dianne Abbot style maths right there.

Son of Mathonwy wrote:

Donny osmond wrote:

cashead wrote:Sweden's got the highest death rate per capita.

I guess that's one way to mitigate the second wave they're expecting - leave no one around to catch it a second time.

6.08 deaths per million. Yes, there "won't be anyone around to catch it second time" is true if you can make 999,993.92 = 0.

That's some Dianne Abbot style maths right there.

380 per million actually. But they're not quite the highest, they're 8th, or 6th if you ignore the town-sized states San Marino and Andorra.

Banquo wrote:

Son of Mathonwy wrote:

Donny osmond wrote: 6.08 deaths per million. Yes, there "won't be anyone around to catch it second time" is true if you can make 999,993.92 = 0.

That's some Dianne Abbot style maths right there.

380 per million actually. But they're not quite the highest, they're 8th, or 6th if you ignore the town-sized states San Marino and Andorra.

I questioned that mentally- I think its the last 7 days rolling they are looking at.

Son of Mathonwy wrote:

Banquo wrote:

Son of Mathonwy wrote: 380 per million actually. But they're not quite the highest, they're 8th, or 6th if you ignore the town-sized states San Marino and Andorra.

I questioned that mentally- I think its the last 7 days rolling they are looking at.

Yeah, must be something like that. 6 is low enough that it might be the daily rate, even.

Banquo wrote:

Son of Mathonwy wrote:

Banquo wrote: I questioned that mentally- I think its the last 7 days rolling they are looking at.

Yeah, must be something like that. 6 is low enough that it might be the daily rate, even.

Do you use Worldometer for the macro numbers?

Son of Mathonwy wrote:

Banquo wrote:

Son of Mathonwy wrote: Yeah, must be something like that. 6 is low enough that it might be the daily rate, even.

Do you use Worldometer for the macro numbers?

Yeah, it's a great roundup of all the official numbers. Unfortunately, excess deaths are much harder to find. Too hard in most cases... it's not clear where the FT gets that data from for instance.

Galfon wrote:ft 7-day roll-aves

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?ar ... ues=deaths

Bra has a popn. 20× higher than Swe, so if you extrapolate you can see what this experiment has delivered to this point - 6-12 months time will show if overall the long game has been worth it.

..of course different states report Covid
atttibuted deaths differently, (e.g Russia excludes 'pneumonia' cases in far-flung regions going through the mincer)

(Do like the way holding your digit on a line brings up a name/colour identifier.. )
Latin America now the epicentre, Africa still relatively unaffected cases wise.

Stom wrote:What do people think about we worldometer? To me, it just seems like some very clever timing and good seo to make some people a lot of money from ads for a relatively simple piece of code

Banquo wrote:

Digby wrote:

Banquo wrote: Can you summarise- didn't catch the show?

The timing was basically saying we've largely compared lockdowns on a human calendar, and so we can cite we locked down at the same time as Germany. But we had more cases by the time we shut down and a virus knows little of a human calendar. Basically if we'd shut down one week earlier we'd have now have been around 1/4 of the deaths we've faced


ETA - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j949

ah ok- I get that from an infections point of view, but our apparent headline infections are not 3-4 x that of Germany? am I being utterly dim?
Slowing the exponential growth in infections is the obvious reason for lockdown.

Digby wrote:

Banquo wrote:

Digby wrote:
The timing was basically saying we've largely compared lockdowns on a human calendar, and so we can cite we locked down at the same time as Germany. But we had more cases by the time we shut down and a virus knows little of a human calendar. Basically if we'd shut down one week earlier we'd have now have been around 1/4 of the deaths we've faced


ETA - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j949

ah ok- I get that from an infections point of view, but our apparent headline infections are not 3-4 x that of Germany? am I being utterly dim?
Slowing the exponential growth in infections is the obvious reason for lockdown.

I don't recall if they mentioned how our headline infections progressed Vs Germany. I think it might have been as limited as whilst we went into lockdown on the same date we had a different number of cases and that meant a much greater spread in our community.


They didn't comment whether that's a good/bad thing nor what it might mean in the longer term if everyone is going to get this and possibly on repeat basis, I think, but I didn't catch every word

Coronavirus: fixated on the flu and shrouded in secrecy, Britain’s scientists picked the wrong remedy
Matthew Syed
Sunday May 17 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines 401 took off from New York, bound for Miami. The flight was without incident until the plane began its descent, the pilot pulling the lever to lower the wheels. Then a problem emerged: a light that should have illuminated to show the front wheel was down failed to do so. This either meant that the wheel was not down or there was a problem with the light fitting. The pilot placed the aircraft into a holding pattern to hunt for the problem.

He pulled the light from its fitting. He blew on it to remove dust. The crew discussed the light, confused about its failure. What could it mean? Indeed, they became so fixated that they didn’t notice another critical issue: the autopilot had disengaged and the plane was descending. As the plane dropped through 1,750ft, an altitude alarm sounded, but the crew — straining their attention on the light, perception narrowing — didn’t hear it. The plane crashed, killing 101 people.

This is considered a seminal incident in aviation, because it reflects a key bias in decision-making. It is easy for groups to become fixated on one aspect of a fast-changing situation, thereby missing others. This phenomenon has many terms, such as groupthink and inattentional blindness, but the point is the same. A defective judgment is made because a group misses something that would have been detectable had it sustained a broader perspective.

We now have a sense of the basis for key UK decisions on the coronavirus. We have this because the government has — belatedly — published some of the minutes from its scientific advisory groups. The documents are impressive. If you look at any one of them, you are likely to conclude that it is underpinned by cutting-edge science. It is only when you look at the papers as a whole, with earlier documents that shaped deliberations, that you notice something curious.

The terminology offers a first hint. The modelling group is called the “scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling”. The key planning document that informed government policy for a decade is called the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy. The review of evidence on whether to shut educational facilities is called the Impact of School Closures on an Influenza Pandemic. A paper on whether to limit public events is called Impact of Mass Gatherings on an Influenza Pandemic.


Can you see the pattern? Advisers were focusing on flu, not a coronavirus. These pathogens have similarities, but they also have crucial differences. In particular, flu has long been considered impractical to contain, in part because it has a short incubation period. As one expert said: “It spreads too efficiently.” The more deadly Covid-19, on the other hand, can be contained. Indeed, by early March, it was clear that transmission was being restricted in parts of Asia through testing and tracing. South Korea has yet to have a single day with more than nine deaths, and has kept offices, restaurants and shops open.

The UK scientific papers are striking not because they failed to examine evidence, but because they failed to examine the totality of evidence. The paradigm of pandemic flu, the template imposed by this concept, shaped both collation and interpretation. The Imperial College model was built for flu. When it looked at different scenarios, it examined only two possibilities: full lockdown and free spread of the virus. Containment wasn’t even considered. This isn’t dissimilar to the crew of Eastern Air Lines failing to notice the altitude alarm.

The history is revealing. UK thinking was shaped by the Asian and Hong Kong flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968. Sars and Mers — both coronaviruses — barely registered. Exercise Cygnus, a simulation carried out in 2016, was based on flu. In early 2020 the UK was still preparing for pandemic flu, stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza. Even as community transmission of Covid-19 was detected, the recommended protective equipment was in line with flu. When an updated document on school closures was submitted in February 2020, it said: “For the purpose of this paper, we assumed that children have a role in transmission similar to that of influenza.”

Looking back on the seminal press conferences of early March, you can see flu hovering like an apparition. The logic of “Contain, delay, research, mitigate” is based on flu. The trade-off that dominated UK thinking — namely, the balance between suppressing the first wave and reducing susceptibility to a second — assumed that containment was not feasible. It was the prism of flu — not evidence emerging from Asia — that led Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, to assert on March 12 that containment was pointless. It is why Jennie Harries, his deputy, said on the same day that community testing was “not appropriate”. It is why there was so little urgency to build testing capacity in that crucial window.

In a fine analysis last week, the historian Sir Lawrence Freedman pointed out that UK policy was based on a “mature conceptual framework”. But the problem is that the framework had matured through a covert process of conceptual narrowing, and was shrouded in secrecy. Many scientists disagreed with the cessation of community testing, but they couldn’t look at the reasoning because it was confidential. Experts were also surprised when the Imperial model was finally published, a program with 13-year-old code. A group at Edinburgh University found that the model gave different outputs when fed the same inputs, and different results when run on different computers.

Ministers couldn’t be expected to spot these problems — at least, not at first. They are not modellers or health experts. They took advice as they grappled with an unprecedented crisis, and had little inkling that it might be dangerously skewed. The blind spot could have been addressed if the advice had been published sooner, which would have invited critique of the kind at which science excels, a point consistently made by Jeremy Hunt. It is not as if transparency would have handed to Sars-CoV-2 secret information that it might use against us.

Testing has been reliably associated with lower death rates. If we never find a vaccine, and move to the Swedish model, testing capacity will still be paramount to shield the vulnerable. It is not coincidental that nations with more testing prevented the virus from spreading in care homes.

The UK has excellent advisers, but even experts are vulnerable to biases. Groupthink was doubtless reinforced by a lack of diversity in thought and experience. Sage is full of modellers and clinical academics, but not frontline experts in infectious diseases or public health.

The government should publish all advice, including from Sage, some of which it is still withholding. To wisely emerge from lockdown, both testing and transparency are mission-critical.

Sandydragon wrote:Anyone else seen this?

Coronavirus: fixated on the flu and shrouded in secrecy, Britain’s scientists picked the wrong remedy
Matthew Syed
Sunday May 17 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines 401 took off from New York, bound for Miami. The flight was without incident until the plane began its descent, the pilot pulling the lever to lower the wheels. Then a problem emerged: a light that should have illuminated to show the front wheel was down failed to do so. This either meant that the wheel was not down or there was a problem with the light fitting. The pilot placed the aircraft into a holding pattern to hunt for the problem.

He pulled the light from its fitting. He blew on it to remove dust. The crew discussed the light, confused about its failure. What could it mean? Indeed, they became so fixated that they didn’t notice another critical issue: the autopilot had disengaged and the plane was descending. As the plane dropped through 1,750ft, an altitude alarm sounded, but the crew — straining their attention on the light, perception narrowing — didn’t hear it. The plane crashed, killing 101 people.

This is considered a seminal incident in aviation, because it reflects a key bias in decision-making. It is easy for groups to become fixated on one aspect of a fast-changing situation, thereby missing others. This phenomenon has many terms, such as groupthink and inattentional blindness, but the point is the same. A defective judgment is made because a group misses something that would have been detectable had it sustained a broader perspective.

We now have a sense of the basis for key UK decisions on the coronavirus. We have this because the government has — belatedly — published some of the minutes from its scientific advisory groups. The documents are impressive. If you look at any one of them, you are likely to conclude that it is underpinned by cutting-edge science. It is only when you look at the papers as a whole, with earlier documents that shaped deliberations, that you notice something curious.

The terminology offers a first hint. The modelling group is called the “scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling”. The key planning document that informed government policy for a decade is called the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy. The review of evidence on whether to shut educational facilities is called the Impact of School Closures on an Influenza Pandemic. A paper on whether to limit public events is called Impact of Mass Gatherings on an Influenza Pandemic.


Can you see the pattern? Advisers were focusing on flu, not a coronavirus. These pathogens have similarities, but they also have crucial differences. In particular, flu has long been considered impractical to contain, in part because it has a short incubation period. As one expert said: “It spreads too efficiently.” The more deadly Covid-19, on the other hand, can be contained. Indeed, by early March, it was clear that transmission was being restricted in parts of Asia through testing and tracing. South Korea has yet to have a single day with more than nine deaths, and has kept offices, restaurants and shops open.

The UK scientific papers are striking not because they failed to examine evidence, but because they failed to examine the totality of evidence. The paradigm of pandemic flu, the template imposed by this concept, shaped both collation and interpretation. The Imperial College model was built for flu. When it looked at different scenarios, it examined only two possibilities: full lockdown and free spread of the virus. Containment wasn’t even considered. This isn’t dissimilar to the crew of Eastern Air Lines failing to notice the altitude alarm.

The history is revealing. UK thinking was shaped by the Asian and Hong Kong flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968. Sars and Mers — both coronaviruses — barely registered. Exercise Cygnus, a simulation carried out in 2016, was based on flu. In early 2020 the UK was still preparing for pandemic flu, stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza. Even as community transmission of Covid-19 was detected, the recommended protective equipment was in line with flu. When an updated document on school closures was submitted in February 2020, it said: “For the purpose of this paper, we assumed that children have a role in transmission similar to that of influenza.”

Looking back on the seminal press conferences of early March, you can see flu hovering like an apparition. The logic of “Contain, delay, research, mitigate” is based on flu. The trade-off that dominated UK thinking — namely, the balance between suppressing the first wave and reducing susceptibility to a second — assumed that containment was not feasible. It was the prism of flu — not evidence emerging from Asia — that led Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, to assert on March 12 that containment was pointless. It is why Jennie Harries, his deputy, said on the same day that community testing was “not appropriate”. It is why there was so little urgency to build testing capacity in that crucial window.

In a fine analysis last week, the historian Sir Lawrence Freedman pointed out that UK policy was based on a “mature conceptual framework”. But the problem is that the framework had matured through a covert process of conceptual narrowing, and was shrouded in secrecy. Many scientists disagreed with the cessation of community testing, but they couldn’t look at the reasoning because it was confidential. Experts were also surprised when the Imperial model was finally published, a program with 13-year-old code. A group at Edinburgh University found that the model gave different outputs when fed the same inputs, and different results when run on different computers.

Ministers couldn’t be expected to spot these problems — at least, not at first. They are not modellers or health experts. They took advice as they grappled with an unprecedented crisis, and had little inkling that it might be dangerously skewed. The blind spot could have been addressed if the advice had been published sooner, which would have invited critique of the kind at which science excels, a point consistently made by Jeremy Hunt. It is not as if transparency would have handed to Sars-CoV-2 secret information that it might use against us.

Testing has been reliably associated with lower death rates. If we never find a vaccine, and move to the Swedish model, testing capacity will still be paramount to shield the vulnerable. It is not coincidental that nations with more testing prevented the virus from spreading in care homes.

The UK has excellent advisers, but even experts are vulnerable to biases. Groupthink was doubtless reinforced by a lack of diversity in thought and experience. Sage is full of modellers and clinical academics, but not frontline experts in infectious diseases or public health.

The government should publish all advice, including from Sage, some of which it is still withholding. To wisely emerge from lockdown, both testing and transparency are mission-critical.

How much difference would an earlier shutdown have made?

The Telegraph reports that if Britain had locked down one week earlier, 75% of British Covid-19 deaths would have been prevented. It’s attracted the attention of the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, and George Monbiot in The Guardian.

It’s based on a model by James Annan, a climate scientist, published on his blog, which was mentioned briefly by the BBC’s always fantastic More or Less programme on Tuesday.

I’m not here to debunk the model, exactly, and I would never dare contradict the More or Less team. I just wanted to flag a reason to be concerned with it.

The word ‘model’ can describe many things, from an all-singing, all-dancing climate model which simulates the action of the entire atmosphere and ocean system down to cubic-kilometre units, to a simple statistical curve which says ‘if X goes up by 1, Y will go up by 2’. The Annan model is very much at the latter end.

[https://l35h2znmhf1scosj14ztuxt1-wpengine]Hindcast/forecast for daily deaths in the UK. Credit: James Annan

Its model is amazingly simple: Covid-19 infections were doubling about every 3.5 days in March; that means you get two doublings in a week. So, if lockdown had happened a week earlier, it would have prevented two doublings, so you’d have got a quarter as many infections and therefore a quarter as many deaths.

You barely even need to call it a model: it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

That doesn’t make it wrong. Simple models are not bad; sometimes they’re more appropriate. But simple models are simple. There’s lots they don’t take into account.

Most noticeably, this one assumed that if lockdown had happened a week earlier, everything else would have happened a week earlier too. But we know that by the time lockdown happened, British lives were already very different. People were voluntarily behaving very differently even without government orders. Schools had closed a week earlier, but I know people who’d taken their kids out of school even before then. I was avoiding public transport, as were millions of others; many businesses were already working from home.

The peak of deaths came on 8 April. That’s barely two weeks after lockdown — surprisingly fast, given that the mean time from infection to death is 20 days, although the median time is shorter. Lockdown may well have been what made infections actually start to decline, but a statistician I spoke to says it seems very likely that voluntary changes in behaviour had at least some effect on flattening the curve.

So it’s not as simple as lockdown a week earlier –> two fewer doublings –> 75% reduction in deaths. If we’d moved the entire process forward by a week — school closures, behaviour changes, everything — that might have done it; but a lot of behaviour change was driven by seeing what was happening elsewhere. Britons saw Italy and China and became rightly scared. It’s not easy to see how we’d have brought that forward.

In their report, More or Less addressed another point, which is that the model also assumes that an earlier lockdown would have been as fully complied with as the one that actually happened; a big assumption, given that a week earlier, people might not have been so scared. That caveat hasn’t made it into any of the other coverage.

None of this is to say that an earlier lockdown would not have saved lives. It almost certainly would. But the stark claim that it would have prevented 75% of deaths — 30,000, so far — is wildly overconfident and I think should be reported with far more uncertainty; the true figure could be much lower.

Digby wrote:Of course if we're going to play If we could equally say the people roused by the urgency of the early lockdown would have committed still stronger to the process and even the morons carrying on with listing friends and family would have bought into it, and we'd actually have reduced deaths by 90%. It being a game of IF different things to the different thing being proposed could have happened

Donny osmond wrote:

Digby wrote:Of course if we're going to play If we could equally say the people roused by the urgency of the early lockdown would have committed still stronger to the process and even the morons carrying on with listing friends and family would have bought into it, and we'd actually have reduced deaths by 90%. It being a game of IF different things to the different thing being proposed could have happened

... which would be exactly his point?

Sent from my CPH1951 using Tapatalk

Coronavirus: Lockdown delay cost lives, says Sage member

Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor
Friday May 22 2020, 12.00pm, The Times
Locking Britain down a week or two earlier would have made a “big difference” to the coronavirus death rate, one of the government’s leading scientific advisers has said.

Professor Sir Ian Boyd, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said that politicians and scientific advisers could both be blamed but suggested that fear that public opinion was not yet ready for draconian restrictions in early March was a decisive factor.

It came as the government’s testing chief hit back in the Whitehall blame game, saying key decisions on stopping contact tracing were made by ministers not officials, and one of the country’s leading scientists attacked the government for a lack of leadership during the crisis.

Sir Ian, professor of biology at the St Andrews University, urged ministers to stop saying they were led by science as it was “slightly misleading”.

He told the BBC’s Coronavirus Newscast: “What we in the scientific community do is give the best advice we can based on the evidence that’s available to us. We then pass it to government ministers and the policy parts of government who can then take that and do with it what they like.”


Sir Ian said that Britain was “a bit slower off the mark” in the crisis than Asian countries that had been hit by Sars in the early 2000s and erred in wrongly assuming this coronavirus would be no more infectious.

“Acting very early was really important and I would have loved to have seen us acting a week or two weeks earlier and it would have made quite a big difference to the steepness of the curve of infection and therefore the death rate,” he said.

“And I think that’s really the number one issue — could we have acted earlier? Were the signs there earlier on?”

Although Sir Ian was not part of Sage discussions in March, he said: “You could point the finger at scientists for not actually being explicit enough. But at the end of the day all these interact with public opinion as well. And I think some politicians would have loved to have reacted earlier but in their political opinion it probably wasn’t feasible because people wouldn’t have perhaps responded in the way they eventually did.”

In March some epidemiologists privately expressed frustration that behavioural scientists advising government urged ministers to lockdown later over fears that people would tire of restrictions imposed earlier.

Sir Paul Nurse, head of the Francis Crick Institute, said “everybody” had made mistakes in the crisis and concluded: “I get a sense the UK has been rather too much on the back foot, increasingly playing catch-up, firefighting through successive crises.”

He urged government to set out “a much clearer publicly presented strategy as to what we’re actually trying to do, and the evidence upon which it is based”.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “Maybe there’s a strategy there, I don’t see it. I’m not completely convinced that we are actually being quite clear in having good leadership.”

Asking who is in charge of strategy and decision-making, he questioned: “Is it ministers? Is it Public Health England? The National Health Service? The Office for Life Sciences? I don’t know, but more importantly, do they know?”

While some in Downing Street have vented frustration at Public Health England, the agency hit back this morning through Professor John Newton, who is also the government’s testing co-ordinator.

He told MPs that strategy for testing was the Department of Health’s responsibility and insisted: “PHE’s role is important but it is one of a number of roles. Strategic co-ordination is undertaken by government departments.”

Pressed on a key decision in mid-March to stop contact tracing, Professor Newton said this had not been taken by PHE, telling the Commons science and technology committee: “Decisions throughout the pandemic have been made by government, advised by scientific advisers . . . The decision on March 16 to stand down the contact tracing and testing was a government decision.”

However he added that modelling at the time suggested that in March the UK was heading for a million cases and “if you have a million cases there is no way, however much contact tracing or testing capacity you have, you could pursue the South Korean model. And at that point it was government’s very significant decision to move to lockdown.”

South Korea, which has had only 264 coronavirus deaths, has become the model for many in government after controlling its outbreak through rigorous contact tracing. But Professor Newton argued that its job was much easier because at one point 55 per cent of cases were linked to a single religious group, insisting: “If we had had that epidemiology we would have done the same.”