What the modelers got terribly wrong about Omicron

January, 26, 2022. I remember when the Imperial College predicted 2 million American Covid deaths in 2020, only for them to acknowledge that 2/3rds of those estimated deaths were inevitable absent Covid. Back in mid-December I saw a UK television model showing that by Christmas, the entire country UK would be infected by Christmas, even by the second week in January the figure was 1 in 15, less than7%. Now, from Spiked (UK), another story about another grotesquely inaccurate model of the Omicron virus pathology.

Everything the government has got right on Covid-19 in the past 12 months has happened when it ignored ‘the science’. If the modellers hadn’t made such fools of themselves in the summer and autumn of 2021 they might have been taken more seriously by the government in the winter. As it was, their incompetence had seeded enough doubt in Johnson’s mind for him to resist going beyond ‘Plan B’ despite almost every ‘scenario’ modelled telling him that hospitalisations and deaths from the virus would exceed anything England had ever seen before.

Nevertheless, it was a close call. On 21 December, Johnson delayed making a decision on whether Christmas would be allowed to go ahead as normal while he awaited a report from Imperial College about the severity of Omicron. When this was published the following day it showed a 40 to 45 per cent reduction in the risk of hospitalisation compared to Delta, and a 50 per cent reduction in risk for people who had a prior infection.

This belated admission of Omicron’s ‘mildness’ changed the game. Less than a week earlier, the same team at Imperial College, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, had said they could find ‘no evidence… of Omicron having different severity from Delta’. On the day before that, the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had appeared on television telling the nation that ‘there are several things [about Omicron] we don’t know but all the things we do know are bad’.

By mid-December, everything we needed to know about Omicron had been explained to us by doctors in South Africa over and over again. They told us that it was much less severe. They told us to expect a large number of ‘incidental’ cases involving people who were in hospital with Covid but were not in hospital because of Covid. They told us to expect more children to be affected but with only very mild symptoms. They told us that Omicron patients rarely needed to be put on ventilation. They told us that there were relatively few deaths despite high levels of infection.