The Posts of Christmas Past

I've been archiving my old Twitter threads as a pandemic history from June 2020 onwards

This is now our fourth Christmas with Covid and we are in the midst of yet another significant wave of infections. Thinking back to the first year of Covid, particularly pre-vaccine, can feel like another world, when countries all around the world were grappling with how to best to cope with a deadly and infectious virus. Because of my role on Independent SAGE, particularly our weekly numbers updates from the summer of 2020 onwards, I wrote many Twitter threads about Covid. These now give a contemperaneous account of how the pandemic evolved from the summer of 2020 onwards.

With the help of a fantastic volunteer (Dr John Lockhart from the University of Central Lancaster), I’ve been converting my old Twitter threads into substack posts as a permanent archive. All the posts can be found in Legacy Covid Twitter Threads on my substack. So far I’ve gone up to the end of 2020, in the midst of devastating Alpha variant wave and I’ll be adding more over the coming weeks and months right up to 2023. To avoid spamming subscribers, I’m not sending out any email notifications for these legacy posts, but I wanted to write this one to let people know they exist.

If you want to know my stance on different issues over the course of the pandemic, or what was known or knowable at the time, these posts serve as a good source. The content has not been altered, but I have (very occasionally) edited for readability in a substack post (as opposed to a character limited Twitter thread). Looking back, I think they’ve held up pretty well and complement the ongoing Inquiry. Of course, all of them were informed by my incredible colleagues on Independent SAGE, from whom I learned so much (and still do!).

The months from June to end December 2020 in Twitter Threads

Over the summer of 2020, I consistently highlighted the importance of improving Test and Trace, for instance in supporting school opening (which we did earlier than many other countries) or to open shops more safely. The importance of addressing social determinants of health , and the disproportionate impact particularly on school pupils and their A-Level results was clear from that summer. Too little was done to try to mitigate the unequal impact.

From July 2020 onwards, I documented the early increase in cases (and why I thought these were real increases) and argued against the narrative that these were all “false positives”. As cases really took off in September 2020, I wrote about the extremely damaging lack of tests (and how demand should have been foreseen and accounted for) and why I disgreed strongly with a “let it rip” strategy (including higlighting Long Covid).

Around the same time we now know that SAGE advised a circuit breaker, I highlighted the rapid increase in cases and suggested we had a few weeks to get cases down. In early October, I wrote about the very different epidemics playing out across different regions of England and in different age groups . I continually talked about the need to improve contact tracing and also discussed ventilation and the need for fresh air.

By mid October 2020, I (and Independent SAGE) were calling for a circuit breaker to stop the rapid increases in cases - and to buy time to implement longer lasting mitigations such as better test and trace and safer indoor spaces. Cases were highest in young adults and lowest in older adults, so hospital admissions were not (yet) reflecting the levels of infection in the community, but this should not have been cause for complacency or delay. Instead regional tiers were introduced - which SAGE never thought would work (see snapshot below). The tiers were not sufficient to bring R below 1 (and so reduce cases), and given stronger action was needed (and it was), the sooner the better.

In November 2020, England entered a short lockdown. I wrote about why it was necessary but also why the time during lockdown needed to be used to strengthen public health mitigations (such as test and trace and indoor spaces). I also urged the UK to learn from international experience, something the Inquiry has unfortunately probed very little into (as Martin McKee and I wrote about for the New Statesman last week). I wrote about the horrible impact of deaths from the increases in October and how this was entirely predictable, and how the second short lockdown nor the new proposed tiers had not magically ‘fixed’ things.

By mid-December it was clear things were going in the wrong direction again and SAGE Spi-B devloped a ten-point Christmas plan, highlighted by Independent SAGE, that families could implement. The government on the other hand did not promote this plan, from its own science advisers, at all. By 21 December, I wrote about the disproportionately fast increase in cases in the South East of England and how it “might not be because of a new strain - *but* it is all certainly consistent with there being a highly transmissable new strain. Govt *must act now* & not wait for this worsening situation to get even worse.” As an aside, I remember doing a lot of media that month trying to get across just how dire the situation was looking (e.g. BBC Newsnight and Radio 5 Live with Adrian Chiles).

By Boxing Day 2020, exactly three years ago, I said there was no good news and we urgently needed a new lockdown - especially given that the vaccine was just starting to be rolled out. By the end of the year, the number of people in hospital with Covid was already higher then the first peak and the Alpha variant was driving scarily sharp increases in admissions in London and the South East. The rest of England would soon catch up. I ended that thread reiterating Independent SAGE’s plan for emergency action: a national lockdown combined with concerted efforts to ramp up vaccination, improve contact tracing, indoor environments, better testing at borders and comprehensive support for more disadvantageed communities. The government finally instituted lockdown a week later, on 6th January 2021, after sending children to school for one day.

Summary

I hope these legacy threads will be useful as reference of what it was like at the time - at least from my perspective (which was also mainly that of Independent SAGE). There are a lot of threads from 2021 - so much happened that year - but I will be adding these to the legacy Substack archive over the coming months. If people found this summary useful, I could do another post like this with a whistestop tour of those threads (say for the first 6 months of 2021 and then the last 6 months) - just let me know in the comments!

And finally, thanks again to Dr John Lockhart, without whom this just would not have been possible. Happy Christmas & New Year everyone!