At the Public Inquiry Professor John Edmunds accepts that there was an over-reliance on modelling early in the pandemic. The modellers decided by Feb 2 that test, trace and isolate wouldnt work to control the pandemic, based on assumptions about flu. Yet all East Asian States had suppressed the epidemics using this method by early March. They might have looked at this diagram from a paper in 2004 after the first coronavirus epidemic which shows clearly that coronavirus infections (bottom left) are very different from flu and CAN be suppressed using isolation of cases.
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