Two years ago I said I was taking Covid ‘with a pinch of salt’ – perhaps I was wrong

‘Surely, I wrote, “come the spring, the crisis will have passed” – and spring was just a fortnight away.’ Rainbows of hope in an infectious diseases ward in May 2020. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Scientists must long to travel back two years and revisit their Covid predictions. So too must commentators who relied on them. That March of 2020 was a nightmare month for the great game of prediction.

Boris Johnson’s press conference on 3 March was a cautious occasion. He had just received wild reports from Whitehall’s scaremongers declaring that 80% of the nation “could be” about to suffer from a killer disease from which half a million “could die”. His response was to take comfort from his in-house scientists, guided down the path to “herd immunity” by his senior advisers, including Patrick Vallance.