The Government will stop publishing Covid modeling in the new year, The Telegraph understands.
Officials from the UK Health Safety Agency (UKHSA) say it is “no longer necessary” to issue R rate updates or publish modeling predicting the number of deaths and hospitalizations.
The move is believed to be part of the government’s normalization of Covid-19 in society and a desire to treat the coronavirus in the same way as other viruses, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or influenza, as the UK moves away from its current cultural an ingrained hyperawareness of epidemiological fluctuations.
Modelling, and the role it played in how decisions were made by government, is likely to be included in the Covid inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett, which will resume in February.
Three years of models
The Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) and UKHSA have been producing Covid models and forecasts for almost three years, which are integral to policy decisions.
“[The UKHSA] took over medium-term forecasts and R ratings some time earlier this year,” Prof John Edmonds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a long-time member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modeling Group (SPI-M), told the Telegraph. .
The final document providing information on Covid modeling will be due on 6 January 2023, almost three years after government science advisers first met in an “emergency meeting” on 13 January 2020 to discuss the emergence of ” the new Wuhan coronavirus’.
The risk to the UK population was said to be “very low” at the time, but by March 2020 the UK was in lockdown and SAGE was meeting regularly to model a central component of the government’s response.
Government modelers of Covid-19
Among the list of attendees at this inaugural Covid – although that name did not yet exist at the time – meeting was Prof Peter Horby, who would later receive a knighthood for finding drugs that help treat Covid; Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, who contributed to the UK getting the best Covid vaccines as soon as possible as Deputy Chief Medical Officer and has also been knighted; Professor Neil Ferguson, whose 2020 model of up to 500,000 Britons dying from Covid played a role in the UK lockdown; and Prof Edmonds, a central figure behind some of the most fundamental models created during the pandemic.
Professor Wei Shen Lim, head of the JCVI, who would later make decisions about who received what vaccine and when, was invited but was unable to attend and sent his apologies, official minutes show.
In recent documents published by the UKHSA, they state that the next EMRG publication of forecasts of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid and the “consensus statement on Covid-19” on 6 January “will be the last”.
The papers include an update on Speed R, once the most important figure in the fight against the virus; the growth rate, which reveals how much the number of infections is increasing each day; how many people are infected each day; and trends in Covid hospitalizations and deaths and regional breakdowns.
Latest R speed data
Current figures show that the R rate is between 0.8 and 1.2 in the UK, the growth rate is between -4 and +3 per cent and there are around 100,000 new infections per day.
These numbers have been relatively stable for several months and will remain so now that life is returning to normal after the lockdown.
“During the pandemic, the R-value, growth rate and medium-term forecast served as useful indicators to inform public health action and government decisions,” said Dr Nick Watkins, Chair of the Epidemiological Modeling Review Group and Chief Scientist on UKHSA data. Telegraph.
“Now that vaccines and therapeutics have allowed us to move into a phase where we are living with Covid-19, with reduced surveillance but still closely monitored through a number of different metrics, publishing these particular data is no longer necessary.
“We continue to monitor the activity of Covid-19 in a manner similar to the way we monitor a number of other common diseases.
“All data releases are kept under constant review and this modeling data can be re-entered immediately if necessary, for example if a new problem variant is to be identified.”
Work on analyzing the data will continue behind the scenes, the Telegraph understands, but the documents and numbers will no longer be published for the public to see.
Weekly updates from the UKHSA on flu and Covid will continue to be published, tracking what is happening, and the ONS Covid Infection Survey will also continue to run, providing information on how many people have the virus at any one time.
The Covid dashboard, no longer the all-knowing force it once was as a result of the end of free testing, will also continue to operate, but is also expected to be reconfigured in the new year.
Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said the UKHSA’s move was “perfectly acceptable” as long as the analysis continued behind the scenes.
“We don’t have regular updates on flu or RSV numbers in the UK and as we’ve seen with the recent Group A Strep (iGAS) story, it’s very unusual to have such detailed data,” he said.
“I guess the data will still be collected, it just won’t be published. The funds could probably be used more effectively elsewhere.
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