I'm not arguing that there is much you can usefully change now. It's probably far too late to make much material difference to public policy now, for the reason

I'm not arguing that there is much you can usefully change now. It's probably far too late to make much material difference to public policy now, for the reasons you have set out yourself. But this could surely have been much better handled during a usefully long window back towards the start of the year when attention was starting to be paid to the virus but it hadn't taken hold in the UK on any significant scale yet. Also, just to be clear, all of the specific issues with the Imperial code that you've mentioned here and in other parts of our discussion today, such as whether to rewrite for better multi-core behaviour or just use single-core, are coming from you not me. My argument is a much simpler one: when it started to become clear that this virus was a significant risk, the government should have provided the necessary resources and the expert advisors should have switched to a model where scientists did the science and programmers did the programming. I don't think anyone can credibly claim that there wasn't enough awareness that this could potentially become a serious issue and so that bringing in broader expertise was appropriate by the time we had things like COBRA meetings being held and secret expert advisory groups being assembled.