'Professor Lockdown' Neil Ferguson told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that the situation was 'a lot more complex' and he does not think he stepped over that line to say 'we need to do this now'.
Professor Ferguson's modelling suggested 250,000 Brits would die from Covid. It led to Boris Johnson telling the country 'you must stay at home' in March 2020Britain's Covid lockdown architect today denied ever calling for the first national stay-at-home order.
The epidemiologist drew heavy flak for his team's modelling on the Covid pandemic. Their work suggested 500,000 Brits would die if nothing was done to stop the spread of the virus and there would be 250,000 deaths if two-thirds caught Covid Imperial College London's Professor Ferguson, nicknamed 'Professor Lockdown' for his infamous modelling, said it was a 'difficult question to answer'.'But as you'll be aware from the evidence I've given in my statement and statements of evidence, the reality was a lot more complex.
If no action at all had been taken against the coronavirus it would have claimed 510,000 lives, the team's report said. Had the Government stuck with their strategy of trying to 'mitigate' the spread – allowing it to continue but attempting to slow it down – with limited measures such as home isolation for those with symptoms this number would be roughly halved to 260,000.
Experts largely accepted that the economically-crippling measures were vital to control the spread of the virus, as there was no vaccine to prevent severe illness and stunt hospital admissions at the time. It comes after a Government scientist today told the inquiry that Covid deaths in the first wave of the pandemic could have been lower if the UK went into lockdown just two weeks earlier.
He added: 'We've got a lot of data about how social mixing changed over this period and actually on or around March 16 seems to be when everybody did start to change their behaviour.
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