The UK’s scientific advisers to the government were forced to scour Wikipedia in the early stage of the pandemic because of a lack of data about the spread on coronavirus in other countries.
A BBC documentary that airs on Thursday, Lockdown 1.0 – Following the Science?, hears from top scientists at the heart of Britain’s response to the virus, and paints a picture of a country unprepared to reduce its spread.
Among those to speak out were members of the the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), which reports to the influential Scientific Advisory Committee for Emergencies (Sage).
Professor Ian Hall of the University of Manchester, who is deputy chair of SPI-M, said: “The public may be surprised that we were using Wikipedia to get data very early on in the pandemic, but that was really the only data that was publicly available that we could access.”
Dr Thibaut Jombart, an academic at Imperial College London and member of SPI-M, who spent six months in the Democratic Republic of Congo fighting Ebola, added that there was a big gap in the basic epidemiological information they were drawing from.
He said the Covid-19 data situation was “less good in the UK” than the Ebola data in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
By the middle of March, it became clear that the official number of daily cases being reported by the government – around 450 – was incorrect, but the extent to which it was incorrect was not clear.
Professor Mark Jit, an academic at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and member of SPI-M, had to extrapolate more accurate information by comparing the number of hospitalisations in China and Northern Italy to the actual data available in the UK.
Jit said: “We were predicting that there were probably close to 100,000 cases each day. This was extremely worrying because 100,000 new cases would mean that about a week later we would get 20,000 new hospital patients a day.”
Dr Nick Davies from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a member of SPI-M, said that the NHS data some modellers were using was “in some cases up to a week old” by the time they were able to use it.
“That was the first time when I started to feel like things really were not in control,” he says.
He believes the subsequent delay in lockdown cost lives and “had lockdown been imposed a week earlier, we may have avoided about half or slightly more than half the number of deaths”.
Boris Johnson announced a complete national lockdown on March 23 – exactly one week after receiving inaccurate advice from Sage about Covid-19’s doubling time.
The documentary has also revealed that the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), which advises ministers, had no specialists on the spread of the disease among humans at the start of the outbreak.
Professor Calum Semple, an academic at the University of Liverpool and member of NERVTAG, said: “Quite a few of us had read the literature for SARS and MERS” but there was no particular specialist who has just focused their entire life on human coronaviruses.
Professor David Matthews, of the University of Bristol, who has been studying viruses for over 30 years, told the BBC that he would have expected to have been consulted on the virus as one of only a handful of UK human coronavirus specialists.
He told the programme that at the time they were one of the only teams that were working on human coronaviruses in the UK.
Matthews said: “You have to remember there are not many corona virologists in the UK at all. I half expected someone in the government to say: ‘Is there anybody who’s got a containment facility and working on dangerous human coronaviruses right now?’ And that didn’t happen.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told the BBC: “Covid-19 is a novel virus – we drew on the relevant expertise.
“We have been guided by the advice of experts from SAGE and its sub-committees and our response helped to ensure the NHS was not overwhelmed.”