How the left loves trying to establish the narrative that we have a Government of charlatans pitched against the collected wisdom of scientists. Yet the real schism lies within science, between the modellers and those who prefer to read real world evidence. With hospitalisations failing to rise at anything like the rate feared a few days ago, and with the UK Health Security Agency poised to announce that yes, omicron does indeed cause milder disease than earlier variants, it feels as if we are heading for the denouement, the gunfight at the OK Corrall, at which one side will win the decisive battle and the other side be humbled.
When omicron first emerged in South Africa a month ago two things seemed immediately apparent: firstly that this variant was a lot more transmissible than earlier variants, and secondly, that it was causing milder illness. Indeed, it was the unexpected mildness of the symptoms which first drew doctors’ attention to the possibility that this could be a new variant – something which was then rapidly confirmed by the country’s excellent facilities for sequencing the virus.
What was anecdotal at first was soon confirmed by real data. A presentation last week by the South African Medical Research Council and Discovery Health, one of South Africa’s large healthcare providers, showed that the omicron wave was evolving very differently from earlier waves. The infection was spreading faster, but hospitalisations were not responding to anything like the same extent as they were during the alpha and delta waves.
Yet in Britain this evidence went largely ignored. Instead, Sage’s modellers – first the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and then Imperial College – put out terrifying projections showing hospitalisations and deaths possibly rising to even higher levels than they during April 2020 or last January’s peak. LSHTM produced a scenario which showed hospitalisations rising to a peak of 7190 a day in January – 60 percent higher than last year.
Meanwhile, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College suggested there could be 5,000 omicron deaths a day this winter without more restrictions.
Sage spokespeople, opposition parties and some government minsters panicked and wanted to throw the country into immediate lockdown, with all the economic and social havoc that entails. Fortunately, however, a sceptical quorum of cabinet ministers wanted to know more. Among the questions I am sure they will have asked at Monday’s cabinet meeting is: why did the modellers ignore the emerging evidence from South Africa that omicron caused a milder disease? Both LSHTM and Imperial’s models assumed that the new variant was every bit as deadly as delta – and they didn’t model the possibility that it might be rather less so.
Does this make the sceptical cabinet ministers anti-science? Hardly. It just means they had the confidence to ask the right questions and realise that different scientists were painting very different stories. Angelique Coetzee certainly wouldn’t appreciate being called ‘anti-science’. She is the South African doctor who discovered omicron and who has consistently warned that European countries are over-reacting to the threat posed by the variant and that they are wrong to distrust data from South Africa.
She and Sage’s models can’t both be right. We are not yet at the end of the story – far from it – but if we do have a massive peak of hospitalisations and deaths over the next month, surpassing that of previous waves, then we will have to respect Sage’s modelling. If not, there will be nowhere for those modellers to hide – given that the government has refused to call a lockdown, their scenarios can be measured against the real-world outcome. If omicron fizzles into relatively little, as it already appears to be doing in South Africa, the government will have to start asking: is Sage, and its fixation on modelling, fit for purpose?
