Coronavirus: Scientists had to turn to data from Wikipedia at start of pandemic, documentary finds

Public may be ‘surprised’ at use of site ‘very early on’, chair of advisory group says

Government advisers had to use Wikipedia to get data at the very start of the coronavirus outbreak in the UK, a documentary has revealed (Getty Images)

Government scientific advisers had to turn to Wikipedia for data at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a new documentary has found.

Some academics told the BBC they faced problems accessing statistics from other countries where the spread of Covid-19 was more advanced, meaning they had to resort to getting information from the website. 

“The public may be surprised that we were using Wikipedia to get data very early on in the pandemic,” Professor Ian Hall, the deputy chair of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) advisory group, told the documentary.

The University of Manchester professor said this was because it “was really the only data that was publicly available that we could access”.

Basic epidemiological information was missing from UK data that SPI-M was working with at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, another member of the group — which reports to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) — said.

Dr Thibaut Jombart, an academic at Imperial College London, told the documentary the situation with coronavirus data was “less good in the UK” than it was with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo — where he spent six months battling the disease.

The scientists spoke about issues with accessing coronavirus data as the UK’s outbreak emerged in new documentary Lockdown 1.0 – Following the Science? , due to air at 9pm on Thursday on BBC Two.

The show also reveals how the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats (NERVTAG) committee first met in January to discuss Covid-19 without including a recognised expert in human coronaviruses. 

One member told the BBC “quite a few” of them had read about SARS and MERS — two other coronaviruses which have led to outbreaks in previous years — but there was no one who had dedicated their life to studying human coronaviruses. 

An expert from the University of Bristol told the BBC he would have expected to have been approached for his help. 

“You have to remember there are not many corona virologists in the UK at all,” Professor David Matthews said. 

"I half expected someone in the government to say, ‘is there anybody who’s got a containment facility and working on dangerous human coronaviruses right now?’ And that didn’t happen.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told the BBC: “Covid-19 is a novel virus — we drew on the relevant expertise. We have been guided by the advice of experts from SAGE and its sub-committees and our response helped to ensure the NHS was not overwhelmed.”