At times over the past few weeks it seems as if the country has fallen victim to a coup led by epidemiologists. We’re no longer fed up with experts, it seems, but we cling to their every word, agreeing to close down the economy and imprison ourselves in our homes on the basis that it will help to ‘flatten the curves’ on their graphs.

Yet as they would themselves be first to admit, their models are only as good as the quality of the data that is fed into them. And this grows more questionable by the day.

For weeks, the response of western countries to the coronavirus crisis was almost entirely informed by figures produced by China. Throughout February, in particular, we watched on with reassurance as the curve of the epidemic peaked and then fell away so that by the beginning of March hardly anyone in China seemed to be contracting the disease at all.

It is galling to learn, then, that the number of deaths in Wuhan, the seat of the epidemic, has just been revised upwards by 50 percent to 3869. And who knows if that is where it is going to end?

Would we know if the real figure was really 10 times, hundred times as high? One thing is for sure, the world has been far too quick to trust China’s statistical returns to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Bizarrely, the director general of the WHO praised China for its transparency – after, that is, it had become clear police had threatened a Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, with arrest for daring to warn colleagues of a novel illness which had reminded him of SARS. Dr Li sadly went on to die of Covid-19 himself.