This is doing the rounds on my Twitter feed this morning. I can see why it’s an in-depth dissection of the U.K.’s approach to the coronavirus. 1/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-path-speci-idUSKBN21P1VF

It’s going to make uncomfortable reading for those in government.From my perspective there are a couple of things that stand out. 2/

As @Jackstilgoe says, opening up the advice and bringing in wider expertise would have been helpful. https://twitter.com/jackstilgoe/status/1247645284571713536?s=21 3/ https://twitter.com/jackstilgoe/status/1247645284571713536

Most people will focus on the implications of this for the scientific advice. But I’m interested in the implications for the advice about the lockdown. It appears from this piece that the highest levels of government thought the UK public would never accept draconian lockdown 4/

It’s possible this is true in the early stages of the disease. I really have no idea. But for now, in the current circumstances, this confidence appears misplaced. I don’t think anyone knows what the public might have accepted earlier on, because they weren’t asked 5/

Which brings me to my point and back to Jack’s tweet. When we think about opening up the advice it needs to be as widely as possible. Early involvement of the public in thinking through the different scenarios and responses would have been helpful 7/

Doing deliberation quickly isn’t easy, but with the right will it is possible. We could have learnt under what circumstances, and what conditions the public might have accepted an earlier lockdown. 8/

Some of the emerging challenges that different groups are facing as a result of the lockdown may have come into starker relief earlier enabling quicker government response 9/

But doing deliberation quickly would have been very difficult. As the article points out, "You know, there's a small little cadre of people in the middle, who absolutely did realise what was going on, and likely to happen” 10/

This is my experience of engaging with government about questions of whether and when to engage the public or not. There is a group of people in the middle who understand the value, but…11/

... struggle to convince those higher up about this value, all about the value of opening up data, evidence and engagement more widely.

I think our response to the coronavirus demonstrates that more openness, not less, leads to better and more effective policy response 12/