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Covid inquiry: Angela McLean says UK could have locked down a week earlier [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The UK had enough data on Covid-19 to go into lockdown on 16 March 2020 – a week earlier than Boris Johnson told Britain to stay at home, the government’s chief scientific adviser has said.
With the benefit of hindsight, Angela McLean said lockdown should have been imposed a full fortnight earlier, but that the government and its scientists didn’t have the data at that point. By 16 March, however, that data was available, McLean told the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry today.
“Given what we knew about how fast this epidemic was spreading… I think there was enough information on that date to say: ‘We need to stop all non-essential contact,’” said McLean, who was made a Dame in the 2018 Queen's birthday honours list.
Earlier in this module, which deals with the government’s response to the pandemic, Christopher Wormald – the chief civil servant at the Department of Health and Social Care now and throughout the pandemic – admitted the UK had been ‘at least a week late’ introducing its first national lockdown.
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In October, the inquiry also heard from Lee Cain, who worked for Johnson in 2020, saying the former prime minister had “oscillated” over whether to lock down for 10 days after a meeting on 14 March 2020.
McLean was asked if she was concerned that the government didn’t have a grip on the situation in early March 2020.
“I was concerned that the people who were being asked to make these very consequential decisions… may not have got their heads round what it would feel like to have three-quarters of the population infected and 1% of them die,” she answered. “It’s clearly unconscionable.”
Lack of data
McLean did, however, say a lack of data on care homes and from the NHS had been an issue for the government’s scientific advisory groups during the early stages of the pandemic.
In an email sent on 28 March 2020 to other scientists working with the government, including her predecessor as chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, McLean writes: “You are going to be horrified when you find out what the data flows coming out of the NHS are like.”
McLean was co-chair of SPI-M-O (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group) during the pandemic, a sub-group of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that advised the government on Covid-19 based on infectious disease modelling and epidemiology.
She said there were similar issues with a lack of data specific to the situation in devolved nations, which made it difficult for SPI-M-O to do its work relevant to those administrations. On both fronts, the availability and use of data got much better over time, she said.
McLean added that there was a lack of transparency from the Treasury over any economic modelling that was being done.
“Whatever modelling the Treasury was doing to consider the economic case [of the pandemic and interventions], I’ve still never seen,” she said.
When asked by the inquiry’s lawyers if she felt the Treasury had sufficient epidemiological modelling experience, McLean said “they could have used some more”. It would have been sensible to seek outside help, she added.
‘Worst moment’
The inquiry has previously heard that Rishi Sunak did not consult the government’s top scientists before launching the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme in August 2020. “I don’t know about any scientific advice that went into that,” McLean confirmed during today’s hearing.
When asked what advice would have been given, McLean said: “That there wasn’t much room for increasing mixing and that the kind of mixing that should be avoided was households indoor. Can you not find another way to stimulate the economy?”
In her written evidence to the inquiry, McLean describes the end of summer and early autumn of 2020 as “the worst moment of the pandemic”.
“It was very frustrating for us to be asked to advise the government and to advise them that the autumn would be difficult and that the difficulty would manifest as rising numbers of infections, but nothing happened,” she told the inquiry.
The inquiry was shown minutes from a 20 September 2020 meeting involving Johnson, Sunak and seven leading scientists, including McLean, Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty, entitled ‘Should government intervene now and if so, how?’.
Prior to the meeting, McLean messaged Vallance to ask: “Does it fit your plan if I rock up and say, ‘RWCS [reasonable worst case scenario] assumes someone gets a grip at this stage of things and it would be great if that happened’[?]”
When asked if she felt she got the message across, McLean replied: “I said those words but nothing happened, so inadequately at best.”
Emergency planning
McLean served as chief scientific adviser for the Ministry of Defence during the pandemic and was co-chair of SPI-M-O. She told the inquiry that she had not heard of Operation Nimbus, a planning exercise held in February 2020, until it was mentioned by Ben Warner, a data expert brought into Number 10, in his evidence to the inquiry.
“If I’d known [in early March] exercise Nimbus had happened I might have been encouraged; if I’d known who’d been there, I might have been a bit discouraged,” said McLean, referencing the fact that secretaries of state responsible for areas such as health were not in attendance.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-19-inquiry-angela-mclean-lockdown-16-march-2020-data-sunak/
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