Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE): Coronavirus (COVID-19) response

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) provides scientific and technical advice to support government decision makers during emergencies.

Role

SAGE is responsible for ensuring that timely and coordinated scientific advice is made available to decision makers to support UK cross-government decisions in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR). The advice provided by SAGE does not represent official government policy.

Find out more about SAGE (PDF, 101KB, 4 pages).

Participants

The group is chaired by the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance and co-chaired by the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, and includes experts from within government and leading specialists from the fields of healthcare and academia.

View the full list of participants of SAGE and related sub-groups.

Expert groups

SAGE relies on external science advice and on advice from expert groups. During COVID-19 this includes the:

New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG)
Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) (Department for Health and Social Care)
Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)

These groups consider the scientific evidence and feed in their consensus conclusions to SAGE.

Scientific evidence supporting the government response to COVID-19

The national and global response to the spread of COVID-19 continues to develop quickly and our knowledge of the virus is growing. These statements and accompanying evidence demonstrate how our understanding of COVID-19 has evolved as new data has emerged.

The evidence was often complied very rapidly during a fast-moving response and should be viewed in this context. The papers presented here are the best assessment of the evidence at the time of writing, and their conclusions were formed on this basis. As new evidence or data emerges, SAGE updates its advice accordingly. Therefore, some of the information in these papers may have been superseded at a later date.

Dynamic reports from the COVID-19 Clinical Information Network (CO-CIN) have been provided to SAGE to highlight ongoing information and evidence about COVID-19 for a large sample of hospitalised UK patients. As the reports are dynamic, the data included and analyses change over time and in each report. Particularly for early reports, there may be a risk of misinterpretation – it is important that any potential signals have been confirmed as robust and not taken out of context. A peer reviewed publication is forthcoming which reports summary results between 6 February and 19 April 2020. A preprint is currently available at: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v1.full.pdf

This page will be updated on a regular basis with the latest available evidence provided to SAGE.

Meeting 22, 2 April 2020

Material was redacted from the first document in accordance with the standard principles governing Freedom of Information when it was first published. However Sir Patrick Vallance and No10 agree that such SAGE documents relating to COVID-19 should be published in full, in the interests of maximum transparency, with exceptions only for matters relating to national security.