Google employee helped UK government switch from disastrous COVID-19 strategy, according to Dominic Cummings
- Reference: 1622038861
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/26/google_employee_helped_uk_government/
- Source link:
During testimony to a meeting of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee, Cummings painted an alarming picture of how a combination of groupthink and poor data led the UK authorities to stick with a response to the spread of the virus, characterised by a flawed plan to acquire herd immunity.
You can watch his testimony yourself, [2]here .
[3]
[4]
[5]
The plan was to try to suppress, but not halt, the spread during the spring and summer of 2020, in the hope of achieving herd immunity by the autumn which would avoid a second wave of infections hitting the NHS during its usual winter challenges.
“You will either have herd immunity by September after a single peak, or you will have herd immunity by January, with a second peak. Those are the only two options that we have. That was the whole logic of all of the discussions in January and February, early March,” Cummings told MPs.
The Warner Brothers, the DeepMind founder and British mathematician Tim Gowers
These assumptions were only effectively challenged after he sought the view of Cambridge maths professor Tim Gowers, Hassabis and Ben Warner, a scientist at SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and a former scientist at Faculty, the controversial AI firm Cummings had worked with since his Brexit days and who was already working with the political string-puller in government.
Cummings told the joint committee he became convinced of a need to change the government’s plan during the week starting 9 March 2020.
“I got in touch with [Gowers], and I started sharing SAGE documents with him in the week… then shortly afterwards, Hassabis, who I also started sharing documents with and talking to. They actually could understand these things.
[6]
"The combination of Marc Warner, Hassabis, Tim Gowers – you had three incredibly able people who could understand the technicalities in a way that I couldn't do, saying this to me, and that gave me the kind of confidence to say to the Prime Minister we should change,” Cummings said.
During that same week, the cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill was urging Prime Minister Boris Johnson to go on television and explain the herd immunity plan, and say it was “like the old chickenpox parties,” Cummings said.
“He said, ‘We need people to get this disease because that's how we get herd immunity by September’. And I said, Mark, you've got to stop using this chickenpox analogy: it's not right’,” Cummings claimed.
[7]
“This wasn't some weird thing that the Cabinet Secretary come up with. He was saying what the official advice to him, to the Department of Health, was. It was a big deal for me and for Ben Warner, to say: basically we think that this whole thing is wrong,” Cummings added.
The problem was that the new data was showing the country was much further along the pandemic curve than its leadership appreciated.
New figures had shown that the number of COVID-19 case in the UK would “completely smash through” the NHS capacity.
Only when SAGE data scientist Ben Warner and Marc Warner, Ben’s brother and CEO and founder of AI company Faculty, sat down with Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser to the government, to discuss the new number, did the problem become clear.
[8]DeepMind founder behind NHS data slurp to be beamed up to Google mothership
[9]'Biggest data grab' in NHS history stuffs GP records in a central store for 'research' – and the time to opt out is now
[10]NHS App gets go-ahead for vaccine passport use despite protest from privacy groups
[11]NHS Digital booking website had unexpected side effect: It leaked people's jab status
[12]NHS COVID-19 app update blocked by Apple, Google over location privacy fears
“The evening of Friday the 13th I'm sitting with Ben Warner.. and [the] prime minister's private secretary in the Prime Minister's study. And we basically say we're going to sit down with the Prime Minister, tomorrow and explain to him that we think that we're gonna have to ditch the whole Official Plan, and we're heading for the biggest disasters have you seen since 1940,” he said.
Even then, it wasn't unanimous in SAGE that the country should be locked down, Cummings claimed.
“Demis Hassabis came in at my request. [I asked] Patrick Valance to bring him in. He's one of the top, data science and AI people on the planet and four people in SAGE argued with him, and said ‘You’re being too simplistic about all of this’. Then Tim Gowers, said, ‘No, that's not correct’. The scientists were still arguing about that at the same time on the 18th, and after that meeting,” Cummings said.
The UK did not enter a [13]full legal lockdown [PDF] until 26 March. ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/06/deepmind_founder_shifts_to_google/
[2] https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/d919fbc9-72ca-42de-9b44-c0bf53a7360b
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YK5wm7pKBuEad@4YmqgzxAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YK5wm7pKBuEad@4YmqgzxAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YK5wm7pKBuEad@4YmqgzxAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YK5wm7pKBuEad@4YmqgzxAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YK5wm7pKBuEad@4YmqgzxAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/06/deepmind_founder_shifts_to_google/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/13/nhs_data_grab/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/11/nhs_app_vaccine_passport_england/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/06/coronavirus_vaccine_nhs_england_data_leak/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/uk_covid_app/
[13] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/timeline-lockdown-web.pdf
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Seems consistent with my timeline
On 14th March 2020 Matt Hanckock was off to meet @DrTedros at the WHO.
It seemed to me at the time that they were still aiming for herd immunity and that Mr Hancock needed educating - quickly - about the dangers.
Re: Seems consistent with my timeline
This was a time that the government maintained we were 4 weeks behind Italy when anyone putting our exponential growth line against Italy's could see it could be no more than two weeks. The issue is people were trying to fit the outbreak into a fnfluenza model and ignoring what the raw data was screaming.
What really frightened me was Professor Ferguson's paper designed to shock the PM into action. It was probably sound but written for an elementary school audience. An acknowledgement that the decision makers had no real grasp of how to handle figures. So much for a PPE education
Not Boris bashing. Corbyn might have been worse.
Cummings' testimony
"The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this." (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/cummings-boris-injected-covid_uk_60ae0424e4b019ef10e12d5e)
For once I agree with Dominic Cummings. However he does seem to be blaming a whole lot of people other than himself, Boris Johnson for not ordering a lockdown earlier, Matt Hancock for being incompetent and lying, the scientists for arguing over things. He even claims that the PM joked that he would get Prof Chris Whitty to inject him with coronavirus on live TV to show people it was nothing to worry about.
It does seem that Boris has a lot to respond to in Cummings' testimony, but Cummings also has to escape the 'spurned lover' image of someone who will do almost anything to harm his previous BFF.
The newspapers will be full of this tomorrow morning.
Re: Cummings' testimony
"However he does seem to be blaming a whole lot of people other than himself"
Well this was knowledge speaking to power. I think you know which way around.
Re: Cummings' testimony
He has also had a year to get his story polished up for the best possible effect.
Re: Cummings' testimony
He was particular scathing about Hancock's public announcement of the 100k tests goal, saying it was getting in the way of building the "proper" testing regime that would scale to the millions of tests required.
I foresee Hancock appearing subsequently and saying he deliberately announced the 100k target to ensure there was pressure to deliver *something* at a time when it was needed rather than waiting for the "moonshot" to get off the ground: Cummings basically admitted that the all-singing, all-dancing test and trace system arrived too late to be of any practical use.
I think the real tragedy of Cummings testimony is that it's clear noone was really in charge and the various bits of government, when they weren't floundering, were competing rather than co-operating. And that problem lies at the door of the man who can "make a case for anything" but make a decision about nothing.
Hang on
It took over a week to realise that a doubling of cases every few days was going to be big trouble, given what was going on in Italy at the time? You didn't have to be a genius (or even a data scientist) to spot that one. Changing national policy/direction was always going to be difficult though, fair play to those who did the persuading.
Re: Hang on
A) The cabinet are all businessmen and so only have the HP financial calculator - it doesn't have an exponent button.
B) Italy it is bad, but they are Italians, we are British so in Britain it will be NOT bad
C) Lockdown hurt profits, that patch of sand looks comfortable, mind if I stick my head in it ?
D) All of the above
"Understand the technicalities in a way I couldn't do"
To these people you DO have to be a genius to see it. It really does seem that they didn't grasp exponential growth, and needed Tim Gowers to tell them!
Now I suppose that it's "cool" that Cummings could call on Dr Gowers, even if it's not his area of expertise. But it's shocking that before he did so the people in charge of our response to the virus had so little understanding.
It's almost as if a degree in classics doesn't prepare one for solving problems of a more scientific or mathematical nature...
Re: Hang on
The fundamental issue is that exponential growths are one of those things that the human mind is really, really bad at modelling. Another one is very low probability events, e.g. getting severe side effects from a vaccine.
For such concepts, you cannot just trust your instinct. You have to run the numbers, at least in a crude way. Problem is, the vast majority of people do not run the numbers on anything, ever, for any reason. They trust what their gut tells them. That includes politicians, and how could it be any different? The whole system is supposed to make them represent majorities, after all.
In late February, even first days of March 2020, I wasn't too worried about the virus.
Then I fit the numbers into an exponential model, and I still wasn't worried, because I just thought that it could not possibly be that bad, and surely I was just using an oversimplified model, and I am not an epidemiologist after all.
I only crapped myself when I saw that, 10 days later, the actual numbers matched my prediction to within a 1% margin. If I had been in charge of anything, that would have been 10 critical days wasted.
And that's me, with my STEM training and all. What chance does a regular Joe have, when half the media tells him to panic and the other half tells him to chill?
Re: Hang on
That may not have been the key realization; taking politicians' primary aim to be re-election, the realization that the people most at risk from Covid were the same people more likely to vote for his party may have been what did it.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we still have influential politicians and pundits claiming the whole COVID-19 thing is a conspiracy and that it is/was no worse than the the common flu!
At least it appears that the UK is having an honest discourse over the government's response so maybe, just maybe, they will do better the next time this happens.
We don't know if it's honest. Cummings is a professional spin artist and its his skill and profession to make things look a certain way to influence people. He has been very effective at it and maintained the government for many years in the face of some very unpopular policies.
Last year the whole country was scathing of Cummings words. This year the nation seems to be swallowing every word.
Tell 'em what they want to hear, trigger the old confirmation bias.
I don't believe him and I don't disbelieve him. I certainly don't trust him. So he might as well be Basil Brush as far as I'm concerned. Actually I don't trust any politician.
Boom Boom
UK put on a good show of 'caring and sharing' But .....
Patched Out,
You were doing so well until ......
"At least it appears that the UK is having an honest discourse over the government's response so maybe, just maybe, they will do better the next time this happens."
Sorry to say but, the 'honest' discourse is all a sham and as usual the opportunity to 'learn' from our mistakes will be fudged and 'nothing' will be learned other than not to depend on someone who you may sack/fire, as they can be vindictive and spoil your political career if they can !!!
example:
Look at how much we have learnt from the Grenfell fire response, as in what has actually changed !!!
>Cummings painted an alarming picture of how a combination of groupthink and poor data
Given this is the chap leading the group of people charged with thinking up policy and that this is also the chap who put himself in charge of all government data I really don't think this is the damning indictment of everyone else Cummings seems to think it is
Fog of war. Is this really "explosive"?