London: The media left and right continues its relentless attack on scientists, and the government’s management of the Covid-19 crisis. It is as if only negative and critical headlines are what attracts the most readers. One point that scientists keep making is that the scientific world is uncertain and scientists do not all agree, scientists (in this case epidemiologists and virologists) make hypotheses which are scrutinised, peer reviewed and debated, they are used to being challenged and accept they may be right or wrong or a bit of both, that is the nature of developing science, and the nature of research into Covid-19. The fact that scientists keep repeating is that there is simply not enough data, yet. And this reality is not compatible with politics, where politicians want definitive advice. Thus the politicians are putting a lot of stock in the advice of “modellers”, however the results from modellers are also inconsistent as they also do not yet have the correct data to generate perfect models.
As the coronavirus has progressively paralysed the population, it has become apparent the UK needs the data on the number of obviously Covid infected, asymptomatic, recovered and the coronavirus free population, everyone agrees this can only be achieved through repeated mass testing.
