This thread is a bit confused: the whole concept of 'lockdown fatigue' and timing the start of lockdown only matter if the strategy is herd immunity by infection. https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1288582186959069188

If the plan is to let the disease spread among the population till the required proportion (60%?) have caught it and developed immunity, then you would time your lockdown for when you're approaching that 60% threshold so the disease infects only that number and doesn't overshoot

If the plan is to suppress the disease then delaying lockdown just extends the required length of lockdown because the more cases you have at the start, the longer it takes to bring them down to a manageable level and engage in suppression policies

Vallance's remark is framed here as a bad forecast, but his use of the term 'peak' refers to the point at which we would have hit or come close to 60% infected if the disease was otherwise running unimpeded through the UK population https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1288582223155920897?s=19

Once the strategy changed from letting the disease spread to trying to suppress it, the 'peak' obviously happened earlier. Seems a bit bad that a senior journalist doesn't understand this?

Crikey I just watched the Newsnight video and they make the same 'peak' error there too! It's even more confused than the tweet thread#&t=9m26s

People worry far too much about political bias in the media and not nearly enough about people involved just struggling to understand what's happening in front of them. Imagine how many people approved this - and *none* of them noticed?