Coronavirus

(asked on 30th October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to validate models of covid-19 impact on the NHS against observed data; and if he will make a statement.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 27th January 2021

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) provides scientific advice to support the Government response to COVID-19. In fulfilling this role SAGE considers a wide range of infectious disease modelling.

Part of this advice includes consensus medium-term projections of hospitalisations and deaths produced by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M). These represent a scenario in which the trajectory of the epidemic continues to follow current trends. They do not account for the impact of future policy or behaviour changes, nor seasonal effects that may affect transmission.

The charts included in the medium-term projections explainer show the consensus medium-term projections SPI-M’s operational sub-group have produced for daily hospital admissions and deaths in England. These projections are plotted on a log scale to better display the large range of values. As these charts show, actual data from October consistently fitted the projections made earlier in the month. These charts are published on GOV.UK.SPI-M does not estimate or project the number of cases. Models are continually validated against outturn data.

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