FALSE: DO NOT SHARE
Claim:
UK COVID-19 lockdown measures were based on false projections of fatalities.
Answer:
Misleading. COVID-19 lockdown measures are designed to reduce the spread of the virus.
FURTHER INFORMATION
This video on YouTube is an interview of a man who is talking through graphs on Covid-19 deaths and projections from different countries. He claims that the UK Government introduced lockdown measures based on a false projection from Imperial College, which would scare everyone into introducing lockdown measures.
This is misleading. Whilst an initial Imperial College projection did show 500,000 fatalities were possible, this was a scenario if the government took no action. The UK Government then implemented social distancing to slow the spread of the virus and save lives, causing the projections to be improved and revised as more data is collected about Covid-19.
Whilst all future projections will have some uncertainty attached, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) are currently projecting UK fatalities to be 40,555 by 4th August 2020.
Imperial College is one of several institutions trying to use mathematical models to predict the spread of the coronavirus to advise governments on corrective actions.
SOURCES
Imperial College London: Epidemiologists launch new weekly forecast of coronavirus deaths
Nature: Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19
Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME): Covid-19 projections
Origins of Claim
FULL TEXT OF CLAIM
“So what is a reasonable estimate [of Covid-19 fatalities] for Britain? 66 million at 10% 3,300 [deaths]. That is the only real world data point that you can use… The Imperial College scare document, this generation’s dodgy dossier, might be a wonderful document, but if you change a figure from 3,000 to 500,000 it is a work of fiction… 530,000 of you could die if we do nothing. No, 3,000 of us may die if we do nothing, which is two days of normal deaths. So basically, they plucked a figure out of nowhere to scare us… The virus is not growing exponentially… The Government lied, created a scenario that was overwhelmingly scary, completely unnecessary, and we are headed to where right where we would have headed anyway, and they are going to take the credit for saving us, when they didn’t do a damn thing but scare the hell out of us. ”
