It was early spring when
British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government.
It was "highly likely," they said, that there was now "sustained transmission" of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom.
If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in
China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die, wrote the scientists, members of an official committee set up to model the spread of pandemic flu, on March 2.