The ‘Covid’ Response Was Not a Mistake – It Was Just Wrong

The Covid response was not an error, and it was not the result of rushing to address a crisis due to an unknown pathogen. It was a lot of people, mostly professionals in the field, systematically and collectively doing what they knew was wrong. It is helpful when this is systematically laid out, as such facts can form a basis from which to stop it being repeated.

Early in 2025, some statisticians from Scotland and Switzerland wrote a discussion paper with a characteristically (for Scots and Swiss) understated, even boring, title: ‘Some statistical aspects of the COVID-19 response.’ Good science is stated clearly without fanfare, while ‘bombshell’ announcements or similar rants indicate a need to embellish. Good data speak for themselves. However, they only speak widely if people read it.

The paper, by Wood and co-authors, was written for presentation at a meeting of the Royal Statistical Society in April 2025 in London. It remains one of the best reviews of the early response to Covid – in this case with a United Kingdom focus but relevant globally. However, some people don’t avidly read the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society – Series A: Statistics in Society, or attend its London meetings. A pity, as London is nice for three days in summer and this particular royal society seems to have a grasp of reality lacking in some of its siblings.

The paper provides simple statistical truths, as statisticians should. Truths are particularly valuable when applied to subjects where fallacies are more profitable. This is why, in public health, they have become so rare, and therefore so worth reading. Stating truths dispassionately regarding Covid helps to grasp how bad the public health response actually was.

Covid and the economy

Public health has always been highly dependent on economic health, so the authors set the scene by stating the obvious of the economics of the response of Western governments who decided in early 2020 that printing money was simpler than making people work to generate taxes: “Creating money while reducing real economic activity is obviously inflationary.” And consequently:

The subsequent sharp increase in inflation is one path by which the disruption has contributed to increased economic deprivation… of the sort clearly linked to substantially reduced life expectancy and quality of life.

This is important, because we knew this long before 2020 (the Romans knew it) and we also knew that the resultant economic deprivation would shorten life expectancy. This is public health 101, and every public health physician knew it when Covid started.

In public health, we recognise that there is a trade-off between spending money to save one person and allocating it elsewhere to save many more. If we just spend without limit, we all get poor and then we cannot really fund healthcare at all. This is not complicated, people understand it. It is why we don’t have MRI scanners in every village. We therefore make estimates of how much can save a life without overly impoverishing society and then losing more. Wood and colleagues looked at the UK standard for this compared to the costs of lockdowns:

Any reasonable estimate of the cost per life-year saved from Covid by non-pharmaceutical interventions substantially exceeds the £30K per life year threshold usually applied by NICE (the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) when approving introduction of a pharmaceutical Intervention.

(Using the high 500,000 predicted mortality with minimal intervention of Neil Ferguson et al. at Imperial College, this) gives a cost per life year saved over 10 times the NICE threshold.

Again, this is basic public health. Allocating health resources is a complicated issue since it is (rightly) tied in ethics and emotion, but on a societal scale it is how we manage our health budgets. In this case, the numbers predicted to be saved through the enormous costs of lockdowns, if lockdowns worked, never remotely made sense.

However, the UK government, like governments elsewhere under the same apparent media-pharma yoke, simply ignored costs and benefits calculations and ploughed on regardless. Guided by its Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), the UK government embarked on a campaign to mislead the public into taking actions it could reasonably expect to be massively harmful on an individual and national level. It knew the campaign to instil fear was unjustified; a campaign of misinformation aimed at the same public who paid it. Wood and colleagues provide “one of the milder examples”:

A widely displayed government poster picturing a healthy woman in her mid-20s in a mask with the slogan “I wear this to protect you. Please wear yours to protect me.”

The actual risk profile that the UK government and SPI-B had at that time is shown in the Figure below, provided in the paper.

This is where statisticians are useful – to provide context in place of anecdote and fear. They provide a good one:

The current best estimate for the return time of a super-volcanic eruption of the civilisation ending magnitude that city dwellers are unlikely to survive is 17 thousand years (Rougier et al., 2018). Even only considering the two years of the pandemic this is likely larger than the Covid risk to the woman pictured.

So logically, if it was being logical about Covid, the UK government should now be gutting its economy to prepare for the aftermath of a super-volcano. But let’s not suggest that, as it might just do it.

Explaining Covid burden

The UK government’s efforts to mislead the public regarding COVID-19 risk were not a case of dealing with an unknown virus, as many are now claiming:

Risk was known early 2020: Diamond Princess, and e.g. Verity et al., 2020; Wood et al., 2020, from Chinese data.

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