Why are 'exclusively bad outcomes' being modelled for governments?

Many governments have pandemic advisory groups giving them expert advice on how to respond to the evolution of the coronavirus; some governments had such groups already up and running before COVID hit, being that they were established years ago in order to make contingency plans for possible pandemics.

In the United Kingdom, the expert advisory group is called SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and its sub-group, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational (SPI-M-O), has just published a new paper on the Omicron variant.

The paper describes three scenarios to be presented to the government for its perusal, and all of them make rather unpleasant reading, given that the best-case scenario of the three has up to 2,000 people dying per day at Omicron’s “peak” sometime next spring.

“SPI-M-O has considered an updated range of scenarios from two academic groups who have modelled the impact of omicron transmission on trajectories of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths,” the paper states. “These groups suggest it is almost certain that there will be a very substantial peak of infections (much larger than occurred during January 2021). There are highly likely to be between 1,000 and 2,000 hospital admissions per day in England by the end of the year…

“Scenarios that assume no further restrictions beyond Plan B generally lead to trajectories in daily hospital admissions in England that have a minimum of 3,000 hospital admissions per day at their peaks, with some scenarios having significantly worse outcomes during the first few months of 2022. To prevent such a wave of hospitalisations, more stringent measures would need to be implemented before 2022.”

So far, the UK government has held off locking the country down again, but the paper states quite definitively that if swift action is not taken, the consequences could be terrible. On the other hand, the paper only presents three scenarios among many possible options, leading Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator magazine, to wonder why SAGE is focusing on doom and gloom when it could be taking into account the far more optimistic outlook prevailing in South Africa, where Omicron was first sequenced.

Nelson’s inquiry was based on something that JP Morgan had already discovered and noted, in a letter to its clients – namely, that if SAGE had taken into account “evidence from South Africa [that] suggests that Omicron infections are milder … [hospital] bed occupancy by Covid-19 patients at the end of January would be 33% of the peak seen in January 2021 … [which was] manageable without further restrictions.” In other words, if the South Africans are right and SAGE is wrong, there’s no need for lockdown.

Nelson decided to ask Graham Medley, chairman of the SAGE modeling committee, to explain the group’s thinking processes. Medley isn’t just a government factotum; he’s a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and presumably he does know what he’s talking about. During their Twitter exchange, Medley was surprisingly frank, though clear answers were still somewhat hard to come by.

“In the low virulence scenario modelled by JP Morgan,” Nelson began, “no further restrictions would be needed so harm to economy and society might be averted. Can I ask you why you didn’t think this less alarming (and quite plausible) scenario was worth including?”

Medley replied, “You know the answer … Decision-makers are generally only interested in situations where decisions have to be made.”

Nelson: “I may be being thick but I’m afraid I don’t know the answer! Why would you not – for completeness – add the scenario where Omicron is less virulent and more restrictions are not needed?”

Medley: “That scenario doesn’t inform anything. Decision-makers don’t have to decide if nothing happens.”

Nelson: “Thanks, this helps me understand. So you exclusively model bad outcomes that require restrictions and omit just-as-likely outcomes that would not require restrictions?”

Medley: “We generally model what we are asked to model. There is a dialogue in which policy teams discuss with the modellers what they need to inform their policy.”

Nelson: “Okay, so you were asked to model bad Omicron outcomes and make no comment as to the probability?”

Medley: “We model the scenarios that are useful to decisions.”

Nelson concludes that “someone,” somewhere, has given the order to churn out gloomy predictions that demand government action. We can see the same process going on in other parts of the world, where pleas from South Africa to look at the data and take note of how mild Omicron is are falling on deafened ears. In Israel, for instance, Prime Minister Bennett, so proud just a few months ago that his government had “defeated” the Delta wave without recourse to restrictions on the general public, has closed the country to foreign nationals, reimposed Green Pass restrictions on stores, forced many students back into distance learning, and is about to roll out a second booster shot to seniors and other “vulnerables,” even as COVID rates are a mere fraction of what they were due to the Delta variant.