Over the past few weeks, the UK strategy on COVID-19 has veered dramatically from contrarian laissez-faire to hasty, panicked adoption of social control measures similar to those in other European countries. An endless stream of British journalists implored us, initially, to simply trust our government’s favored experts (and, implicitly, to ignore the suspiciously foreign advice of most other epidemiologists, including those employed by the World Health Organization).

This stance became increasingly hard to defend after it emerged that the government’s initial strategy — allowing the virus to infect the young and healthy in the hope of building “herd immunity” that would protect vulnerable groups — was, at least partly, based on faulty modeling. Specifically, scientists advising the government had used data for a different disease with a much lower hospitalization rate than had been observed in countries hit earlier by COVID-19.

Pro-government commentators quickly divided into two camps, with the first adopting a position that’s almost too absurd to engage with seriously. They claimed that nothing about the government’s approach had actually changed, the public had simply failed to understand it properly.