The Scottish leg of the Covid-19 inquiry has, like the hearings in London, become bogged down in matters such as the deletion of WhatsApp messages on ministerial phones. But, with a slightly less attention-seeking counsel for the inquiry, it also seems to be getting to some of the nuts and bolts which should have been discussed in London. A few of the most revealing pieces of evidence so far have been presented by Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the Scottish government during the pandemic. Here are some of the highlights of his oral and written evidence.

Woolhouse was deeply critical of Holyrood’s declaration ‘there is no such thing as a level of acceptable’ loss. This, he said, was tantamount to announcing a ‘Zero Covid’ strategy ‘but it was never, in my view, a rational basis for making health policy, not least because it was bound to fail’.     It would have required, he said, more than a year’s worth of hugely damaging restrictions which neither Scotland nor any other country in the world followed in practice.

Woolhouse was also critical of some of the media coverage, especially BBC television news

Too much emphasis, he said, was put on reducing the number of people’s contacts rather than reducing the risk from contacts. ‘Halving the number of contacts and making every contact only half as risky are similarly effective in suppressing transmission,’ he said. Concentrating on the latter could have allowed society to open up sooner. The Scottish Government Covid Advisory Group (SGCAG), he reveals, was never asked to advice on how to keep the country out of lockdown.

Bans on outdoor activities, he suggests, were pointless because ‘it was clear from the first half of 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 transmits very poorly, if at all, in outdoor settings. This was discussed on more than one occasion at SGCAG but not, as far as I can tell, ever communicated as advice to minsters.’ If so, then that would appear to be the advisers, rather the government, who were at fault in this case.

As in England, he suggests, no assessment was made of the harm which would result from lockdown. ‘This was despite it being obvious that lockdown was likely to cause severe harms to the economy, education, mental health, health care access and societal well-being, and that those harms were likely to affect some sectors of society more than others, exacerbating inequalities.’

Woolhouse asserts that the lifting of restrictions during the summer of 2021 was too slow. In particular, he says he advised the government that it would have been safe to reopen schools in May 2020 – when Denmark did. In the event, Scottish schools remained closed until August.

The UK-wide response to Covid, he says, ‘was overly influenced by modelling’. One of the big problems at the beginning of the pandemic was that the models took into account schools but not care homes. Yet Covid proved of little risk to most children but of deadly risk to the elderly. The models took into account social distancing in society as a whole but not the effect of cocooning vulnerable groups – hence policy ended up revolving around the former. In late 2021, the modelling over-estimated the risk from the Omicron variant because, although there was evidence from South Africa that the variant caused a lot less severe disease than previous variants ‘SPI-M-O modellers were not willing to assume lower pathogenicity and so their modelled scenarios all generated huge waves of hospitalisations and deaths’.

The models, he added, assumed a single R number for the whole country when in reality the R number in the community was lower than the R number in care homes, leading to the risks of community spread being over-estimated.

Woolhouse was also critical of some of the media coverage, especially BBC television news. It was wrong, he said, to give the impression that hospitals were ‘overwhelmed’ during the first wave because while some hospitals in London were full ‘overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period’. The BBC also over-reported deaths of healthy young adults, ‘thereby giving the impression that these were common. In reality, such deaths were extremely rare’.