The video sheds light on the critical decisions made by the British government during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the lockdown implementation. It highlights the government's instructions to its citizens to remain at home, only venturing out for essentials, and discusses the unique circumstances during this period where Britons experienced unprecedented restrictions. Central to the narrative are the decisions based on scientific assumptions that were later questioned as being potentially flawed, contributing to a high death rate in the country.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. leviathan [lɪˈvaɪəθən] - (noun) - A thing that is very large or powerful, often in a burdensome or oppressive way. - Synonyms: (behemoth, giant, colossus)

The leviathan of the state was to deprive its citizens of their liberty.

2. entrenched [ɪnˈtrɛntʃt] - (adjective) - Firmly established and difficult to change, often used with abstract concepts such as beliefs or problems. - Synonyms: (established, ingrained, rooted)

By mid March, Covid-19 had become entrenched in Europe.

3. epidemic [ˌɛpɪˈdɛmɪk] - (noun) - A widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time. - Synonyms: (outbreak, plague, scourge)

It was a judgment on where we were in the epidemic cycle.

4. adherence [ədˈhɪərəns] - (noun) - The act of sticking to a plan or set of rules. - Synonyms: (compliance, conformity, observance)

At the time that we predicted the epidemic was going to peak, so working on the idea of say four to five weeks at which adherence was possible.

5. fatigue [fəˈtiːɡ] - (noun) - Extreme tiredness resulting from mental or physical exertion. - Synonyms: (exhaustion, weariness, lethargy)

People start to experience fatigue, adherence drops right about the time the epidemic is going to peak and then of course you get many more cases I think in hindsight we can look back and say, actually, overwhelmingly, adherence to lockdown was fantastic

6. compliance [kəmˈplaɪəns] - (noun) - The action or fact of complying with a wish or command. - Synonyms: (obedience, conformity, adherence)

But then it goes on to say there is no strong evidence for public compliance rates changing during a major emergency.

7. intuitive [ɪnˈtjuːɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive. - Synonyms: (instinctive, inherent, innate)

The evidence is not strong, but the effect is intuitive.

8. hunch [hʌntʃ] - (noun) - A feeling or guess based on intuition rather than fact. - Synonyms: (suspicion, guess, premonition)

In other words, this was a bit of a hunch, but a hunch of great importance, because if ministers hadn't been told this, it is at least conceivable that they would have chosen to lock down earlier

9. precautionary [prɪˈkɔːʃənɛri] - (adjective) - Involving actions taken before an event to prevent negative consequences. - Synonyms: (preventive, protective, safety)

They employed the so called precautionary principle, the idea that if you don't know, if you can't be sure, then you err on the side of caution.

10. enamored [ɪˈnæmərd] - (adjective) - To be filled with a feeling of love for; to have a liking or admiration. - Synonyms: (infatuated, captivated, charmed)

Finally, sometimes instead, our government appeared as if it was a little bit too enamored with the science and the scientists around them.

Coronavirus - Why did the UK lockdown so late? - BBC Newsnight

It was the most momentous fortnight for any British government with the most momentous decisions taken by any British government since the war. From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction. You must stay at home. Britain shuts down. We won't go out, we won't socialize, we won't head to work, we will not shop. The leviathan of the state was to deprive its citizens of their liberty.

You should now only go out when absolutely necessary for food, medicine, work or exercise. A form of house arrest for the greater good. Good morning. It's 06:00 on Tuesday, the 24 March. People around the UK are waking up to unprecedented restrictions on the way we live. These steps are not requests, they are rules. And yet Britain's deaths are among the worst in the world.

This is the story of a newly mighty state with a grand plan. How it was made and how those, those who made it may have miscalculated. There's a theme to this crisis. It's time. Infections per day, deaths per week. When to lock down, how long to lockdown for? Too early, too late. You wouldn't always know it from the coverage, but there was quite a bit that the politicians and scientists actually got right during this crisis. But it was these central questions about time and timing that you can argue they got most wrong right at the very start.

The scientists made an assumption, an assumption about all of us, about how we might behave, that some now say not only proved wrong, but was disastrous. By mid March, Covid-19 had become entrenched in Europe. Italy was the epicenter. But as its tentacles spread across the continent, government after government began to shut down their societies, questions were asked as to why the British government wasn’t doing the same. One of the reasons was a belief that if those measures were brought in too soon, the consequences could be dire.

It was an assumption which underpinned the models ministers received, models produced by spy M, effectively the government's very own scientific modelling service. This was something that was widely discussed by many academics throughout March and into April that you need to make sure that people are complying. At the time that we predicted the epidemic was going to peak, so working on the idea of say four to five weeks at which adherence was possible, then this could influence the timing of lockdown coming in.

What you don't want is a situation where you might introduce lockdown too early and then say four to five weeks. People start to experience fatigue, adherence drops right about the time the epidemic is going to peak and then of course you get many more cases. I think in hindsight we can look back and say, actually, overwhelmingly, adherence to lockdown was fantastic.

Where did the idea that was widely discussed at the time, that it would only last and people could only endure it for four to five weeks come from? So I'm not quite clear where this idea came from. I know it’s something that the chief medical officer was concerned about, and it was raised in March. Indeed, it was a theme Chris Whitty and other scientists spoke of repeatedly. It is important on this. It's not just a matter of what you do, it is also a matter of when you do it. Because anything we do, we've got to be able to sustain.

Once we've started these things, we will have to continue them through the peak and that is for a period of time, and there is a risk if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it'll be difficult to sustain this over time. But that didn't turn out to be true. And curiously, there doesn't appear to have been much evidence for it at the time either.

Spy B is another scientific advisory body which focuses on and advises government about human behaviour and psychology. If evidence for this idea of lockdown fatigue had any basis, you might think that they would have been the ones who came up with it. Not so. This term. Behavioral fatigue seemed to have somehow emerged at a fairly early stage in the process. Certainly didn't come from spy B, and it's not a behavioral science term.

You know, if you look in the literature, you won't find it because it doesn't exist. You know, there's speculation about where it came from, but it was a potentially problematic term because it grossly oversimplifies what is quite a nuanced situation. This isn't hindsight either. There were plenty who expressed skepticism of this idea at the time. The advice from the scientific experts beside Boris Johnson today was, if you do too much too soon, there'll be fatigue and people won't get bothered by it. Really? Well, I would like to see the modeling behind that, and I have my own concerns.

So if Jeremy Hunt had got his wish, what would he have seen? Minutes from the relevant meetings are contradictory. Spy B minutes from the 4 March say empirical evidence for the behavioral and social impact of an adherence to each of the strategies is limited. We are not aware of any evidence on their interaction. These comments are therefore based on the collated expert opinions of spy B participants. But curiously, the main sage minutes from the 13 March record that there is some evidence that people find quarantining harder to comply with the longer it goes on.

The evidence is not strong, but the effect is intuitive. There is no comparable evidence for social distancing measures, but experience suggests it is harder to comply with a challenging behavior over a long period than over a short period. But then it goes on to say there is no strong evidence for public compliance rates changing during a major emergency.

So if the idea didn’t come from spy B, then where did it come from? One theory we’ve been pointed to by scientists and officials is that it came from the so called nudge group, a Whitehall body which makes insights into human behavior to help governments achieve their goals. Its head is David Halpern. In early March, in an unbroadcast BBC interview, he said this a simple example would be as Chris Whity has talked about very soon people are going to be asked if you’ve got a kind of a cough and so on, or suddenly a light fever or anything like it, just to self isolate.

But at the moment were still in flu season. So most people who do that right now, then it's probably not coronavirus. So, you know, if you can have two or three of them over the next few months, you know, oh my goodness, again. So it's exactly a good illustration. You don't want to cry wolf, you want to start asking people to do these things, which are potentially quite a big ask when they're likely to be affected.

The nud unit has told us that the idea of lockdown fatigue did not originate with them. They categorically never proposed or suggested behavioural fatigue with respect to Covid-19 and in particular never proposed fatigue as grounds to delay or shorten social distancing or any other measures aimed at Covid-19. However the phrase entered the public or policy discourse, it was not from us.

Mister Halpern declined our request for an interview. Nonetheless, at the time, the intuitive power of lockdown fatigue was widely cited. An important part of the science on this is actually the behavioural science. And what that shows is probably common sense to everybody in this audience, which is that people start off with the best of intentions, but enthusiasm at a certain point starts to flag common sense, intuition, what comes naturally. This with regards to behavioral fatigue appears to be all there was.

In other words, this was a bit of a hunch, but a hunch of great importance, because if ministers hadn't been told this, it is at least conceivable that they would have chosen to lock down earlier. And as many scientists have since said, many lives could have been spared.

It is also a pretty difficult charge against any scientist or group of scientists to base such a central planning assumption of such consequence on something for which there doesn't appear to be any evidence. There's no science behind the idea of behavioral fatigue. There are some parallel situations, for example, in emergencies, where after a period of time, people kind of get used to being in an emergency situation.

But that's a completely different thing. As a behavioral scientist, we're quite used to people who aren't behavioural scientists coming up with ideas, and they seem perfectly commonsensical to them and speaking in rather loose terms about things that actually there is a scientific basis for. So, you know, I couldn't blame someone like Chris for saying, you know, for bringing up this notion of behavioral fatigue. But I think at a very early stage, the government should have said, actually, that's not a thing.

And, you know, that was kind of just a phrase that was brought out of thin air. But there was another assumption which underpinned the thinking in those early weeks. It was a judgment on where we were in the epidemic cycle. So we think that the peak may be something like ten to 14 weeks away. It could be a bit longer. But they were wrong. Our peak wasn't ten to 14 weeks away. Had Sir Patrick Valance been right, we'd have been experiencing a peak in deaths in late May or early June. Instead, we probably hit it on April 8.

There was far more Covid in the system than they believed. Within days, as new data came in, government quickly changed its tune. We weren't as far behind southern Europe as they thought. I said that I thought we were perhaps four weeks behind where Italy was. I think the new numbers suggest we're maybe more like three weeks. In terms of that, it was a fateful mistake, as Sir Patrick has since admitted.

Actually, everything that we were looking at was probably about two to three weeks out of date in terms of what the infection was doing in the community. So, yeah, I think that was. That was a big error, and I think that has undoubtedly led to the large number of deaths that we've had and also to the duration of the lockdown, because if you start your lockdown sooner, it goes away quicker because you've got fewer cases to get back down again.

So two assumptions about how long we'd accept lockdown where we were on the epidemic curve, two critical assumptions which affected all that was to follow, were wrong. Now, you might say that this lets the politicians off the hook. After all, they received the advice on asymptomatic transmission on where we were on the curve on when we might fatigue. And they listened to it, they listened to the experts, and that is commendable, and there is some truth in that.

But it’s also true to say that by minister's own admission, we didn't know much about this disease. And yet when we look back, some would say that politicians took decisions almost as if they did. Even government's own modellers now say that some of their work and assumptions ought to have been treated with more caution. Models should only form part of a decision making process. They have a role. But what we need to remember is that these are models.

They are a description of reality, and they can certainly provide advice. But a decision maker needs to take into account expertise from a wide range of areas in terms of making a decision. Indeed, there are many who would have liked to have seen less advice from the modelers and more from those with experience of the management of public health.

You get the advice that you ask for. So the government appears to be relying very heavily on modelers and behavioral scientists, who are very important, of course. But what's really clear is that there was not enough input from the public health experts and the communicable disease control experts, the people who understood how to manage epidemics on the ground, and who had the day to day experience of dealing with epidemics and infectious diseases. They were not at the table and they should have been directing the operations.

In other words, some of Britain's Covid travails were centered in the limitations of building models to time a lockdown when data was incomplete, at best. Other countries sometimes appeared more cognizant of this. They didn't wait. They employed the so called precautionary principle, the idea that if you don't know, if you can't be sure, then you err on the side of caution. When your data is so incomplete, you assume that you can't calibrate or gain something.

Finally, sometimes instead, our government appeared as if it was a little bit too enamored with the science and the scientists around them, despite its reputation for populism. They were waiting for the data to come in to tell them they had a problem, by which time they already had a problem.

I think there is a question that if you commit to taking scientific advice and following it, and my committee has heard that in every material respect, the government has followed the scientific advice, then there is something in the nature of a scientific body that is going to proceed on a scientific basis. In other words, on the basis of evidence. Now, of course, that's important, and that's rigorous, but literally, it takes time for evidence to come in, to be collected, to be analyzed, and then conclusions to be drawn. And it may be that other countries that didn't make such a big and public commitment to following the science were freer to make judgments that anticipated, if I can put it that way, the evidence I followed the advice of our world leading scientists.

At each point we've been following scientific and medical advice, we are following the expert scientific and medical advice. We must continue to follow the scientific evidence. That's the key verb in all this, follow. But by the time the politicians followed, by the time the scientists had calibrated, finally, sometimes the right moment, the right time had already passed. It is a curiosity that some countries with so much less scientific capacity than our own, fared so much better than we. Perhaps this is one of the reasons.

Either way, as we look to the future at the possibility of a second wave, the calculations and potential errors of the past, both scientific and political, entwined as they are, ought not to be far from our thinking in the present.

That was Lewis Goodall. Well, we asked the department for health and social care in the government office for Science, for someone to join us. No one was available. A government spokesperson said. At every stage we have been guided by the advice of sage experts from Sage and its subcommittees, and our response ensured the NHS was not overwhelmed, even at the virus's peak, so that everyone was always able to get the best possible care.

Politics, Science, Leadership, Uk Lockdown, Covid-19, Government Decisions, Bbc Newsnight