Boris Johnson Teaches William Farr to Hugo Keith

What goes up must come down

During Boris’s deposition, the leading KC, Hugo Keith, asked whether he accepted that he oversaw a “rollercoaster lockdown” as he was hesitant to introduce harsher restrictions.

Mr Johnson answered that nature very largely drove the “rollercoaster, and we needed to consider the extent to which we were able to control the rollercoaster.”

The readers who followed the John Snow series will recognise Farr’s law of epidemics, which we explained in Lecture 13.

In a sentence, the law says that what goes up must come down.

And that is precisely what happened in the Broad Street 1854 cholera outbreak and in Lombardy in March 2020: different timings, windows, and eras but the same principle.

A bit of evidence combined with experience and common sense can prevail.