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Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. Back in March, before the UK's lockdown, she and her team published a study suggesting that the coronavirus may have infected 50% of the British population back in early March, before the lockdown measures were put in place. The model concluded that continuing on a path toward herd immunity would be the most sensible course of action.
Boris Johnson's government originally chose to aim for a model like Prof. Gupta's, just as those notorious irrational hotheads the Swedes were. It soon, however, gave in to public (read: Twitter) pressure. Boris called in that professional harbinger of doom, Imperial College's Neil Ferguson, instead.
A tale of two models
Prof. Ferguson's model was nothing short of apocalyptic, featuring as it did half a million dead, and bodies piled up in car parks outside hospitals - everything but a yawning crevice in the ground and satyrs raining hell from the sky. So stark was the warning that he seemed to take it to heart, deciding to treasure a few moments with his married mistress while he could. For this small indulgence, he was eventually forced to resign from his post. But his thinking informs the government's coronavirus policy to this day.
Prof. Gupta's model, on the other hand, predicted that just 1 in 1,000 of those infected with Covid-19 would need to go to hospital, and possibly an order of magnitude less. This would have placed the true mortality rate at 0.1% or lower, something much more like the flu and much less like a Hollywood disaster movie. Today, almost two months on, the problem with all of this is pretty much the same as it was then: we just don't have enough information.
Comment: For a more in-depth analysis of the effects of the lockdown on the health of millions, see: