A new resource for searching official SAGE documents from Jan 2020 - Feb 2022

Introducing a new website, sagesearch.info, useful for anyone wanting to explore the Covid-19 advice SAGE gave to the UK government.

What is SAGESearch.info ?

With the help of some amazing volunteers, Catherine Finnecy, Sandy Laping and Sue Davies and my unnamed web developer, I’ve created a simple, easy to use, website that let’s you explore all of the official reports that fed into, or were produced by, the SAGE scientists advising the UK government. The website is called SAGEsearch: sagesearch.info .

Together, we’ve curated a set of 905 documents produced from January 2020 to February 2022 (after which SAGE was stood down for Covid response). Documents cover a whole range from SAGE minutes to the behavioural subgroup (SPI-B) reports, the mathematical modelling from SPI-M, to variants reports and detailed epidemiological papers on transmission, hospital admissions, public health measures and more.

Each document has been assigned to one or more topic categories (e.g. “Variants”, “Education”, “Hospitalisations”, “Public Health Measures”) and to one document type (e.g. “SAGE Minutes”, “ONS”, “Vaccines update group”). You can filter on any combination of these and on date range, where the date is the date of the meeting/report.

For each document, I’ve also generated a short summary of the content in three or four bullets that is super helpful in getting a quick overview to see what was discussed and whether you want to read the whole thing. These summaries have been generated using AI (I used a variety of tools) and so I can’t guarantee their accuracy - that said, I’ve checked a fair few and they were all pretty good. You can do a free text search (as well as any filtering you like) on the summary content. The screenshot belows shows me searching for “children” in documents between June and September 2021.

Each document is given with its summary and a link to the government website and a link to the PDF version. Note that I can’t be held responsible if the government changes its links, but hopefully they won’t!

Who is SAGESearch.info for?

I see SAGEsearch as being most useful for anyone contributing to the Covid-19 public Inquiry (e.g. as a witness or core participant) or for journalists/writers covering the Inquiry - or the pandemic more generally. It is also useful for interested members of the public or those in other countries who want to understand more about what the official science advice was and when it was given.

If people are also interested in the reports and public briefings given by the more public facing and not official government group Indie SAGE (of whom I’m a member), then they are all available and searchable on our website IndependentSAGE.org. You can read about that website in this short post.

Thanks again to the incredible volunteers who helped me and I hope others find this resource useful.