Last week @RobinToal met @IndependentSAGE Chair and Founder, @Sir_David_King King to discuss the UK government response coronavirus pandemic and trust in science. With #PubsReopening in England, furthering the possibility of a #secondwave, we’re sharing the best bits. Thread

What problems was @IndependentSage trying to solve?

The main point is that we put our advice into the government, as SAGE does, but we also put our advice into the public domain, and the object is to demonstrate how trust can be developed with the public.

#COVID19 #coronavirus

Producers know that if they approach members of government, including science advisors, they always get turned down. That's not the way to get the #trust of the public. If you want the public to behave in such a way that we manage the pandemic, you have to have their trust.

Do you think that the gov's response to the crisis has damaged trust?

Oh, yes. The response of the PM was to kind of deny the truth. The idea seems to be that if you tell the public everything is good, then it is good, and you have to keep repeating that until they believe you.

Today, the government figures are that 1000 new viral cases are happening every day. 1000. If we were right the beginning of the epidemic, and it was 1000 new cases a day, we would be going into total lockdown. How does it make sense at this point in time to come out of lockdown?

Unbelievably it wasn't until April that the government announced a new test and trace system was being developed through the private sector. Now, these companies that are running this have no prior knowledge of the #health sector at all.

#COVID19

We have a healthcare system, publicly funded, dotted around the entire country. We have these healthcare systems in local communities, GPs. We have school nurses. We have this whole system in place, which is ignored by these private companies.

Incredibly, they're persisting with this process. Baroness Dido Harding, announced in parliament she didn't think that her system would be fully up and running until September. So why are we coming out of #lockdown now, when the virus is still so extensive in the country?

Do you feel that you have a good understanding of the government's strategy in response to the #coronavirus pandemic?

I don't think anyone has a good understanding of the government strategy. The word, "Strategy," doesn't seem to apply to what they're doing.

It was very clear that the policy announced by the Chief Scientific Advisor to the British public, on television, standing alongside the Prime Minister, said, "The strategy is herd immunity." And herd immunity means 70, 80% of us get the disease, develop the antibodies or die.

The estimate of the number of people who were dying wasn't difficult to make, it would have been 200,000 to 500,000. If the government was following that route, that's a pretty deadly route to take, that 500,000 extra deaths. This is like a major war.

#PubsOpening #SecondWave

So that was untenable, but it took the SAGE group a long time to do a full computer analysis. So it's mid-March before the analysis emerges, could be 200k to 500k people die. Unbelievable. It's not rocket science, right? And then we spent another week without going into #lockdown

The disease was spreading at a rate that was amounting to doubling every three to four days. That means if we have 50,000 deaths today, we have 35,000 deaths that could have been avoided just by making a decision one week earlier.

#ukpubs #coronavirusuk

But there's something much worse to it than that. The longer you leave it, even a few days, the more virus there is in the country, the longer the lockdown takes. And so it hits our #economy.

So no, I can't see strategy at the moment. It seems that we might be in denial, to say, "We've got the best testing trace system in the world," when it's probably the worst. It looks like they're still in electioneering mode. It doesn't look like they're bothered with the truth.

Is it reasonable to assume that the government's approach has damaged how the public engages with how to solve the problem?

Two things have been lost in terms of #trust.

Trust in the #science as we've got a battle because the gov kept saying, "We're following the advice of the scientists". The PM stands there with these two scientists and it looks as if they agree with them. They didn't say they agreed with him, but it just looks as if they do.

There's also trust in the government and when you put those two things together, the people are questioning what they should do.

#coronavirusuk #ReopeningSchools

When the coalition government came in under David Cameron, that was removed (gov scientists being able to speak to the media).

That's, to me, abandoning #leadership, but it was also abandoning the principle of open and honest scientific advice.

We've got a gov that has an 80 seat majority and knows it has four years to run. I think they're super confident that once this epidemic is over, by #herdimmunity, or by vaccines, or whatever means, that they will emerge with a burgeoning economy in time for the next election.

I want to see this #coronavirus removed from this country. I want to see net zero new viral cases, as happened in Spain, by the way. Spain had five, six days of net zero deaths. We are still at over a hundred deaths a day, and that's when we went out of #lockdown.

I fear that come the winter, this virus may well spread in the way that a normal flu virus spreads in the winter, and we would have a #SecondWave. I fear then, of course, our economy takes longer to recover than almost every other country.

The country that's got out of this in Europe most successfully is #Greece. The Prime Minister there announced to the population that he was handing it over to his science advisors and they followed every bit guideline the @WHO had given them.

Unbelievably, we didn't do anything at all. The #science advisors were clearly running the show in Greece, and that is right. If you think that the politicians could make a better decision than the scientists, when faced with something like an epidemic, then think again.

The School of Government in Oxford has a list of 190 countries in order of how well they've handled the pandemic. #Rwanda is 3rd, they've handled it without any deaths occurring of people within country and shut down their borders. They did everything right. The #UK is 186th.

How did that happen?

We haven't seen a strategy emerging from the government that is coherent, that is government-wide, that is using local communities. It's an incredibly poor system. Inventing a private sector process in the middle of a massive #pandemic, unbelievable.

Thank you to @Sir_David_King and @IndependentSage
for participating. You can learn more about their work here https://www.independentsage.org/independent-sage/

The unedited discussion is available to read and watch in full here
https://www.radicaltransparency.org.uk/sir-david-king 

#radicaltransparency #COVID19

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