Evidence suggests Scots officials reacted faster to virus than UK counterparts

Brian Monteith (“Statistics shame the Scottish Government in handling of Covid”, 8 June) seeks to pressgang some statistics into demonstrating that the Scottish Government’s handling of coronavirus has been worse than that of other nations within the UK.

He says his statistics come from Cobra, yet they present an incomplete and misleading picture of the epidemic in the UK. If Cobra have been relying wholly on data such as these, it’s perhaps no surprise we are in the mess we’re in.

Since the 1960s, an internationally accepted measure of deaths due to respiratory viruses like influenza has been excess deaths – total deaths minus expected deaths, perhaps suitably standardised to allow for differences between populations (including age, which Mr Monteith makes no mention of). This is partly because attributing cause of death in individual cases is difficult, especially so for infections whose clinical course is incompletely understood, as is the case with coronavirus. Excess deaths in several European countries are monitored by the Euromomo collaboration (www.euromomo. eu). Earlier on in the epidemic these data were badly affected by reporting delays, but as mortality gradually returns to normal levels, the true picture begins to emerge.

Already it seems the UK has fared appallingly in comparison to most other European countries, and that within the UK it is England that may have been hardest hit.

Mr Monteith also makes various ill-judged comments about the role of Scotland’s Government in managing the epidemic. In fact, the evidence suggests the authorities were rather more responsive than their UK counterparts: Covid-19 was made notifiable here earlier, large gatherings were banned earlier, schools were closed earlier, face masks were recommended earlier.

However, it is undoubtedly the case that they had limited impact – the catastrophic error was not to lock down earlier. But it is not clear that Scotland,

under present arrangements, had the economic and political powers to allow such a drastic policy divergence even to be considered.

The reasons the UK got it so wrong are undoubtedly complex, and it will need the full powers of an enquiry to uncover them. The UK hosts some of the world’s most renowned epidemic modelling teams, notably at Imperial College, London School of Hygiene, Cambridge and Warwick Universities, and yet here we are with one of the world’s worst

Covid-19 death tolls, probably only matched by that other epidemic modelling powerhouse, the US.

So, there are some very serious questions to ponder about the relationship between academic science, public health and policy in the UK. By setting up her own team of scientific advisers early on, Nicola Sturgeon appears to have come to the same conclusion.

PADDY FARRINGTON Professor emeritus of statistics

The Open University Marchmont Road, Edinburgh