Introduction

Kit Yeh is director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. He says Matt Hancock's messages show a lack of scientific understanding. One message suggests that only 33,000 people would be expected to die from COVID-19 if everyone in the UK became infected. But this was six months into the pandemic and he thought it had burned itself out. And another shows Boris Johnson using an incorrect mortality rate figure instead of what we call the 'case fatality rate' This should have been called the infection fatality rate.