The pandemic is over and, rightly, SAGE is gone. Announced this afternoon, the freedom-hating advisory board will stop meeting regularly, though the government has placated hypochondriacs by promising they stand ready to reform. Like an epidemiological Take That…

SAGE met monthly from January 2020, though increasingly pushed for lockdowns and Covid measures, which when ignored by Boris proved massively surplus to requirement. The government has taken back control once again…

Now midway through November, almost 5 months sine the July 19 “freedom day”, we can review whether or not it has been the disaster SAGE doom-mongers predicted it would be. According to the SAGE modelling published on 14 September, in a worst case scenario the UK could expect well over 6,000 hospitalisations per day throughout the month of October. In SAGE’s best case scenario Britain could expect around 1,700 hospitalisations per day by November 2. The central forecast was for some 4,300 hospitalisations a day by the start of November.

Real data has completely disproven the gloom and doom prophesies relayed to the public by SAGE and the government. On November 2 just over 1,000 people were admitted to hospital with Covid-19. That is below the most optimistic scenario outlined, and almost 80% below their central forecast scenario. On top of that new ONS data shows a clear downward trend in the number of cases and hospitalisations. With new therapeutic treatments coming to treat Covid optimists are even more confident. The doomsters have been proven comprehensively wrong, again.

For the last week there has been increasing concern from DHSC and SAGE about rising Covid numbers following a sluggish booster jab programme and a steady rise in the number of Covid deaths. Chronically poor predictor and gloomster Neil Ferguson is already warning that the UK may need to reimpose restrictions and just yesterday the Coronavirus Act was extended for another six months without a hitch. What is the data actually saying?

According to the Spectator’s Data Tracker on October 12, Covid patients occupied just 5% of all NHS hospital beds and whilst the optimum NHS bed occupancy was around 85%, 5.5% of NHS hospital beds are not currently occupied by patients. Daily Covid hospital admissions are 80% lower than they were during the pandemic peak and it’s clear that the link between cases and hospitalisations is still largely broken. Given all this, it seems too soon to panic. 

So far the government is remaining firm in its decision not to reimpose restrictions. On this morning’s media round Kwasi reassured the public that “any talk of lockdowns is not helpful – it’s not going to happen”.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng "categorically rules out" another Covid lockdown telling LBC: “Any talk of lockdowns is not helpful - it’s not going to happen”@NickFerrariLBC pic.twitter.com/IUwO30SmPx

— LBC (@LBC) October 20, 2021

The government should stick to its guns on avoiding another lockdown, getting booster jabs into the arms of the old should have the highest priority…

Plenty of noise is being made this morning about the the joint Commons Health, Science and Technology Select Committee’s new report on the government’s handling of the pandemic. Inevitably, some have immediately jumped at the chance to blame Number 10 and the Health Department for failing to contain the spread and naively adopting a herd immunity strategy despite the risks. Obviously, that strategy was wrong: the fact the government later pretended not to have taken that approach would suggest they think so too. 

What caught Guido’s eye in the report, however, was how critical it is of the scientific advice that dictated the government’s response in the first place:

“In the first three months the strategy reflected official scientific advice to the Government which was accepted and implemented. When the Government moved from the ‘contain’ stage to the ‘delay’ stage, that approach involved trying to manage the spread of covid through the population rather than to stop it spreading altogether […] The fact that the UK approach reflected a consensus between official scientific advisers and the Government indicates a degree of groupthink that was present at the time which meant we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been.”

In other words, the government was wrong to consistently accept the scientific advice, and should have challenged SAGE’s input more often. Quite the departure from the Twitterati’s squawks that the government should always and only “follow the science”…

The report later adds:

“We accept that it is difficult to challenge a widely held scientific consensus. But accountability in a democracy depends on elected decision-makers taking advice, but examining, questioning and challenging it before making their own decisions.”

The government made lots of mistakes last year, yet it’s clear they were also being guided by ill-informed voices. Of course, that’s bound to happen in the chaos of a pandemic; it was a novel virus and no one really had all the right answers. Hindsight makes this look a lot easier. Still, this hardly vindicates Whitty, Vallance, and SAGE – and going forward, as the report says, there should be an effort to “include more representation and a wider range of disciplines” when making these decisions…

SAGE has had to release an embarrassing mea culpa after getting their summer Covid modelling badly wrong. A new document released by the advice body admits the modelling “did not foresee such rapid transient change in dynamics”, citing possible reasons such as:

• The closure of schools for the summer
• “A period of warm weather”
• Changes in behaviour following the Euros
• The pingdemic forcing so many isolations

How the nation’s brainiest boffins did not foresee warm weather during the summer, nor the closure of schools, is pretty astonishing. This country has had enough of experts…

Expert activists and hyper-political scientists from Independent SAGE told us time and time again that the NHS would be over-run and cases would hit 100,000 per day if the UK opened up on July 19, Ferguson went as far as saying we could be at 200,000 cases by now. Professor “Pantsdown” himself, Neil Ferguson has now corrected himself and admitted he was wrong to be so certain, “hard-line-centrist” Christine Pagel has also admitted she was wrong – she had claimed she was backed by science and Boris was being ideological. No such mea culpa has been heard from politicians like Keir Starmer, or the political professors like the communist on the SAGE committee, Susan Michie. Broadcast media amplified their hysterical predictions which have now been shown to be false, will they take future predictions with a pinch of salt?