Within a week, the country was in full lockdown, with police apprehending sunbathers in London parks and deploying drones to catch those who dared go for a harmless walk in the Peak District. Yet Prof Ferguson’s study was every bit as dubious as Sage’s previous advice. We will never know what would have happened had the UK Government done nothing to tackle Covid-19, but we can get some idea of the usefulness and quality of the professor’s modelling thanks to a team at Uppsala University in Sweden.

In April 2020, these researchers used a version of Ferguson’s model to predict that Sweden would suffer 90,000 deaths by the end of May 2020 if it carried on with its liberal policy, and 40,000 deaths if it introduced a full lockdown. In the event, Sweden didn’t impose a lockdown – and suffered just 4,350 deaths by that date.

‘Follow the science,’ we were told ad nauseum at the start of the pandemic. As today’s report makes clear, that’s exactly what the Government did in the first three months of the crisis – by bowing to Sage’s every recommendation. And a fat lot of good it did. Scientific method might often give us answers to life’s problems, but in the case of Sage’s modelling the Government might as well have responded to Covid by reading tea leaves.