The broadcaster, which claimed to have seen the leaked official document, said the model’s purpose is to calculate excess deaths in England and Wales between July 2020 to March 2021, and by no means represents a prediction.
It added that according to the SAGE report, in England and Wales, there could be 81,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19, plus 27,000 excess deaths from non-coronavirus-related causes, while in Scotland, there could be 2,600 direct COVID-19 deaths, and 1,900 deaths could be in Northern Ireland.
The official report also assumes that schools would remain open even if lockdowns measures need to be put in place to contain eventual local outbreaks.
"As a responsible government we have been planning and continue to prepare for a wide range of scenarios, including the reasonable worst-case scenario", a UK government spokesperson said, as quoted by the BBC.
The UK, which has recorded 331,644 cases of the novel coronavirus and 41,886 coronavirus-related deaths so far, ranks fifth among the world’s most affected countries by number of fatalities, sitting behind US, Brazil, Mexico and India.
