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2020-

2020-09-27 c
THE COVID-CON I

The making of Britain’s Covid catastrophe

A witches' brew of weak leadership, scientific groupthink and the precautionary principle has caused our current crisis.

The way in which the British government decided to announce the latest set of restrictions on social life was something of a back-to-the-future moment. The chief medical officer and chief scientific officer were wheeled out to make dire predictions, paving the way for the prime minister to emerge from his bunker to tell us what we must do, based on the science, for our own safety.

The first time around, back in March, the tone felt about right. There was a lot we did not know about the virus, there were worrying pictures of what might be about to happen, and the idea of a short intense shutdown to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed by a surge of serious cases seemed reasonable.

But a great deal has changed since then. We now know a lot about the

the virus and what it has been doing, and we know that the seriousness of the disease – in population terms – is much less than was originally feared. We know that the pictures we saw on our televisions were highly selected, in the way that disaster reporting usually is. We know that the extreme predictions of disaster that did so much to frighten people in March were based on catastrophist extrapolations of models with biologically naive assumptions, models that have been shown to be wrong many times before.

So this time the tone seemed wrong. The scientific talking heads again presented a one-sided, extreme version of what might be about to happen, untempered by even an acknowledgement of the many possible alternative interpretations of the data, and without deigning to take questions. (read more)

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