An argument, which I have considerable sympathy for: The coronavirus data from this week suggests that the UK did not need to enter a shutdown. I’d be interested to know your thoughts (reasoned, please!) once you’ve read these tweets. Here’s how the argument proceeds. [Thread]

Obvious disclaimer: I’m not an epidemiologist. But we don’t restrict informed commentary on, eg, financial crises to economists, and we don’t (yet) live in a public-health oligarchy. Am happy to be corrected on figures and assumptions in this thread. [1]

The rate of increase in new Covid cases has slowed very substantially (halved) over the last week. New cases remain well within NHS capacity (the Deputy CMO said yday we are “a long way away” from ventilator demand outstripping supply, for eg). [2]

Given this data has a time lag of 3 weeks, this improvement would seem to be a result of the fairly mild social distancing happening before shutdown (in the weeks of 9th and especially 16th March). [3]