Since I barely sleep these days, here's a thread on things you find out if you read all the SAGE papers that the government just published:

Like many texts, you can read as much from what is there as from what is not. There was little analysis of what a lockdown can do. There

was no confident plan ever made for trying to suppress the virus. The one time it was considered in the middle of March, "SAGE was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of Covid-19 will cause a second peak." We know now, from the many countries that have

successfully suppressed the virus that they were unanimously wrong. But significantly since this point, and despite mounting international evidence, SAGE does not seem to have had any significant conversation about a change in strategy. There were some brief notes made by SPI-B

on behavioural questions of shifting to a "suppress and control" strategy by late April.

In fact this is a matter that characterises all of the minutes: there appears to be a complete lack of interest or inquiry into how other countries are dealing with the crisis. Instead,

COVID-19 is perpetually presented as a sort of parochial British phenomenon with only parochial British solutions. Occasionally a jealous glance is spared for Germany or South Korea, but there is little consciousness of this as an international phenomenon. As such, departures

from WHO advice (which have been hugely significant to the UK's massive death rate) do not seem to have been discussed at all, nor reconsidered at any later point. Nor does Britain's harbouring of the virus ever present itself as an international problem to the committees.

Instead of these important strategic discussions, there has mainly been firefighting, and a whole lot of prattle about whether masks are effective or not. Perhaps this lack of international scope shows itself too in the lack of thinking about the measures that were taken in

Britain: almost all of the social distancing and non-pharmaceutical interventions were modelled very early on. At no point do these assessments of the effectiveness of these interventions seem to have been tempered by experience. As such there was no discussion of whether the

lockdown was firm enough. There is no evidence of anyone saying "this has worked here - perhaps we should try it." Discussions about the need for test, trace, and isolation strategies that were present in other countries came way too late.

Elsewhere the views of SAGE have

simply been bizarre. By mid-March they had convinced themselves the UK was 4-6 weeks behind Italy in the curve. It was obvious to anyone watching that this was simply incorrect. To prove my point, here is my own little chart I was making at the time just from reading the

international press (I posted this on Facebook on 8th March). It was not only clear then that we were only 2-2.5 weeks but that lockdowns were inevitable here. Everything about the international view has been similarly blinkered, and it continues this way. Still nothing is

questioned about the UK's major departure from international standards for dealing with this thing. Still lessons are not being learnt from elsewhere.

As far as other omissions go, perhaps the greatest is any discussion of how people might be protected within households. SAGE

does not ever seem to have discussed what can be done, how sick people should be treated at home, and how to collect data on people who are not sick enough to be hospitalised nor need help, but who may well be infecting their households. There have been no discussions about how

people might be removed from their households to protect those who live with them who may be at risk. As such, SAGE simply accepted that there would be a whole lot more cases because they assumed no measures could be taken and people in the households would just get sick.

But

most peculiar to me is that this is a committee that has never said to itself, "oh God, this is all going wrong, we need to draw a line and work out how we can fix what is happening some new way." Instead it is committed to battling on. As it does so, the minutes show a stubborn

bureaucracy, that gets ever more bogged down in details as bodies pile up all around. And the worse the situation gets the more stubbornly detail-oriented the discussions become, and the less the committee seems capable of anticipating what horror the next week will bring.

If there is one story about change though, it is also found in what goes missing in the minutes. From the end of March, Dr David Halpern's name stops appearing in the list of attendees. No doubt he had a massive barney with someone and I'd love to know the inside story. Perhaps

someone can investigate this. For those who don't remember, Halpern was the guy who did the rounds on a load of TV shows in early March promoting the herd immunity strategy. He is also almost certainly behind the failed notion of "lockdown fatigue" and was also almost certainly

behind the idea of "cocooning", which one SPI-B document reveals as a euphemism, because they know the idea would not go down well (never mind the fact that it didn't work and got 20,000 people killed.) Halpern isn't actually a scientist. He is the executive director of the

Behavioural Insights Team, which is a private company owned by the Cabinet Office - part think tank, part PR agency, and responsible for everything from developing online platforms to discipline benefits claimants to the "See it, Say it, Sorted" slogans on the transport networks.

One thing that Halpern isn't though, is a scientist. He is a wonk, and a career civil servant, with no expertise in pandemics. The BIT is, in general, committed to the promotion in government of "Behavioural Economics". The proponents of Behavioural Economics like to present it

as a valid scientific discipline (as opposed to a theory or hypothesis.) The truth is that it's less a discipline than an ideology or a political position - and it is well known to be attached to a notion of "libertarian paternalism". The shibboleths of Halpern's approach is that

he likes to present everything as an "insight". More significantly the unit's view of the world is begins with the idea that the lives of the wretched are wretched because they don't behave right. And if only they can have good behaviour sold to them, by people who know better,

with some advertising, then their lives would be improved. In fact maybe they would improve because they start to behave "well" like the people who want them to behave well, who nonetheless offer them advertising instead of food and housing and security.

In any case, Halpern's

views are rather representative of much of what gets the attention of this government: justifications for barbarism against the weak dressed up as science. It is all swish snake oil and scientism, of precisely the sort that allowed a Dominic Cummings, who believes that good genes

are what make you smart, to find himself running the Department for Education under Gove. Halpern clearly won out in the early part of SAGE's response to COVID-19. It had disastrous consequences. Nobody even seems to ask why this guy was even on SAGE, especially when there were

no public health and infection control specialists on the committee. But something caused him to be sidelined and I'd love to know what.

One last little nugget from the SAGE papers before I pop a zopiclone and curl up for a few hours of dreamless chemical sleep: back on May 1

the committee recommended that for Test, Trace, and Isolate to be effective it would have to involve isolating contacts of suspected cases and not just positive tested cases. The government has utterly ignored this in the system it has set up. We will as a result be at the mercy

of very slow and unpredictable turnaround times on tests (this is especially a problem since a tranche of the tests from April didn't even have people's NHS numbers attached to them.) If people want to put pressure on not following the science, this may be a spot to look at. I

suspect that the government simply decided that such a measure would just be too costly to keep us all safe, and so the massacre continues.