Self-indulgent anniversary post
You and me got a whole lot of history
Welcome
Well, it’s been a strange week on here. Something I bashed out in 90 minutes first thing on Wednesday morning went a bit viral, and a lot of people chose to subscribe off the back of it. Welcome! Nice to meet you, hope you stick around! Today I want to reflect on a few things both for new and old subscribers - my year on Substack, the experience of having a post get promoted like this, and one more quick thought about the UK COVID Inquiry.
Just by the way of introduction for new subscribers, I’m Oliver Johnson. I’m a Professor in the Statistics Institute in the Maths Department at the University of Bristol. I wrote a lot about the pandemic from a maths point of view, often at my Twitter account @BristOliver (but I’m locked out of that one now, so I’m using @orbit_silver instead). I try not to be too tribal - so for example I was in the “hospital admissions look bad” camp in Autumn 2020, but in the “open schools” camp in June 2020 and March 2021 (see below). This year I published a book called Numbercrunch, which tries to use mathematical ideas to make sense of the world more generally.
Anniversary waltz
It’s funny, but today is actually this Substack’s first birthday. Before things went a bit silly I was already planning to do a brief review of how it’s gone, and to pick out some of my favourite posts. I started writing here because I was alarmed by Musk’s takeover of Twitter and what it might mean for my ability to get my ideas across there - as I described here:
Since then, a lot of my content has been COVID-based, sometimes just as a way of backing up old Twitter threads - for example I posted here about the evidence that Long COVID isn’t occurring at the rate that it used to. But for example in April I wrote about why I wasn’t convinced by calls to go back to masking for the Arcturus variant (remember that one?), which I think aged fine.
But a few non-COVID posts which I’m proud of and that people might have missed at the time are a) this one about a clever person’s idea of a clever person:
b) an alternative vision for Rishi Sunak’s “Maths Until 18” policy
c) the pleasures of going for a walk
So overall, I’m happy with how my Substack experiment has gone. Thanks to this week, I’ve got just over 2,000 subscribers (more than I have Twitter followers now) and the interactions here seem more pleasant here. So I’m planning to stick around and keep posting here, though I’m not expecting to manage anything like as many as the 59 articles I wrote in the last year. Thank you so much for being here and for reading my stuff, and if you like what I’ve written then please do share it more widely.
COVID Inquiry
As I mentioned at the start, the article I wrote about Dominic Cummings’ appearance at the UK COVID Inquiry took on a life of its own this week. This was largely due to a signal boost from the man himself, that it was
almost the only thing I've seen that understands yesterday & the critical points…
Getting the article boosted to his 300k Twitter followers and forwarded to his 49k Substack subscribers had quite the effect on views here, and it ended up being promoted in the Politico PM mailout and reprinted more or less intact by the Spectator.
It’s funny though, for all that it’s flattering that Cummings and others found it interesting, it’s hard not to take it all as a salutary reminder of something that I’ve talked about in Numbercrunch and elsewhere. That is, popularity and social media virality are very much random things: it’s not something you can plan for deliberately. I’m happy that people seemed to like the article though, and for something written in haste there’s not too much that I’d want to change on reflection.
Partly because of Cummings’ appearance, there has been a lot of focus on the COVID Inquiry this week. I think that, rather like the state that COVID itself has reached now, the Inquiry is going to continue to rumble on in the background for a long time and only occasionally break through into public consciousness. It’s very much a marathon and not a sprint.
In fact for me, one of the key modules doesn’t start for a long time (perhaps we might see it in 2025?!). This is the one on Education, children and young persons. I hope that this module really does delve deep into some of these issues, for example trying to understand exactly what role was played by the Independent SAGE report of May 2020 in persuading the teaching unions that a return to school after half-term was unsafe. I also hope to write something between now and then about the modelling in this report, which I believe significantly over-estimated the risk to children at the time.
But for now, there was a teaser for some of this discussion, as reported in one of Tom Whipple’s Twitter threads, regarding Helen McNamara’s evidence to the enquiry. As he reports, McNamara’s witness statement wrote that:
It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to read this! The language is so close to what I wrote in a Spectator piece back in June 2020:
The continuing school closures have undermined the principle of universal education: significant attainment gaps will have grown between the haves and have nots. While teachers have worked hard to provide online resources and activities, those will have less impact in households with limited access to electronic devices, where parents themselves have a lower level of education and cannot afford a tutor to fill in the gaps. Indeed, as young people meet up at shopping centres and elsewhere, they are still risking infection without any of the benefits of attending school.
As a member of what the Telegraph referred to as “Team Openers”, it’s hard not to reflect on how much vitriol some of us took at the time for arguing that the benefits from educational settings being open might outweigh the relatively low risks to young people from the virus. Hopefully this forthcoming Inquiry module will be able to take a more dispassionate view than we managed at the time, and come up with some recommendations for the future that weight childrens’ learning and safety properly.
But in the meantime, thanks again for reading, have a good week, and if you like my posts here then do please share them more widely.
Re: schools closing. I was very much in favour of schools closing, and I now think I was very wrong. However, I was reflecting back on the first time schools closed, and the context.
My son was in Yr 6, and I clearly remember how scared we all were. I saw parents with raw hands from hand washing (remember that?) We really didn’t know how it would affect anyone, including children. Most of us absolutely wanted schools closed (admittedly being reasonably able to cope with the logistics of this).
Further, can we ever know how much transmission would have occurred should schools have stayed open (contact through public transport, to teachers, back into multi-generational households etc).
However, having seen the effects on children and families, I think schools should have stayed open, particularly after the first lockdown. I suppose my point is- I have come to this view with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t think I *really* knew that the effects of Covid on children would (generally) be mild, or that cooped up in a London flat would have such a detrimental affect on social skills, although we are otherwise well resourced.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I didn’t think about this because I didn’t know; or I was in such a state of uncertainty that I didn’t consider such factors.
Apologies for the brain dump; I struggle with the long- term effects on children that I see daily and trying to reflect on the decisions that were made.
Happy anniversary and thank you for your posts this year. Your writing has kept me (relatively) sane re: Covid.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I will digest it further over the weekend.
‘But none of these questions were easy or obvious, I think!’-- this is really important. I do think that in the absence of knowledge , there was a desire to grab on to some certainty and this may have lead to less good decisions and maybe even the future polarisation of views (eg ‘ZC’ vs. ‘Minimisers’).
I heard D. Spiegelhalter on something this week (R4?) saying that it would have been more useful for scientists and politicians to have admitted to more uncertainty. But I’m not sure how politically possible that is (given the need for a degree of public confidence and the desire to appear decisive) together perhaps with a human need to be told what to do in a time of crisis.