Key scientific data and advice the UK government is using to guide its covid-19 response won’t be published until the pandemic ends. Documents used to make decisions and the minutes of meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) will only be made public when the current outbreak is brought under control, according to Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser.

In a sent earlier this month to MP Greg Clark, who chairs the House of Commons science and technology committee, Vallance said: “Once SAGE stops convening on this emergency the minutes of relevant SAGE meetings, supporting documents and the names of participants (with their permission) will be published.”

SAGE currently meets twice a week and passes advice to government ministers. The committee’s decision-making and membership have come under scrutiny because of the government’s reluctance to announce strict social distancing measures to minimise infection. Critics also want to know why the government initially played down the importance of testing for the virus. Ministers have repeatedly said they are following scientific advice, and that such advice will be central to decide when – and how – to lift social distancing restrictions.

“It’s disgraceful,” says Allyson Pollock, co-director of Newcastle University’s Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Sciences, UK, who was one of dozens of experts who signed a letter in The Lancet medical journal last month arguing that government advisors should be more transparent. “We ought to know who is advising the government,” she says. “What is the government hiding and who is it protecting?” Government employees and publicly funded university scientists – likely to make up a large number of SAGE members – are accountable to the taxpayer, she says.

Government officials have published some details of the scientific research discussed by SAGE, including influential results from disease modellers at Imperial College London that prompted prime minister Boris Johnson to introduce broader social distancing restrictions last month. But other details remain secret, such as initial discussions over the controversial idea of developing “herd immunity” among the UK population, and the role played by behavioural scientists in government advice. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, is among those who argue that public health advice should have been more prominent in SAGE’s decision-making.

“I think they should be sharing who the key people are and minutes of their meetings,” says Devi Sridhar, a public health scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who also signed the letter published in The Lancet. “I think transparency is incredibly important and we’ve taken this route in the Scottish Government Covid-19 Advisory Group. We share the names of members and minutes.”

The refusal to publish minutes of the advisory group meetings until the pandemic is over also contradicts the UK government’s own guidance. The 2011 Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees says meeting minutes should be published “as soon as possible” and written in an “unattributable form” – meaning there is no need to identify members. Advisory committees “should operate from a presumption of openness” the code says, and also publish meeting agendas and final advice.

According to the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, hundreds of scientists are feeding into the work of SAGE. One reason for not publishing the rolling membership of the committee is to protect those scientists, shielding academics from potential abuse if they are named publicly.

The UK should now be able to cope with the spread of the covid-19 virus, according to one of the epidemiologists advising the government.

Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London gave evidence today to the UK’s parliamentary select committee on science and technology as part of an inquiry into the nation’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower.

The need for intensive care beds will get very close to capacity in some areas, but won’t be breached at a national level, said Ferguson. The projections are based on computer simulations of the virus spreading, which take into account the properties of the virus, the reduced transmission between people asked to stay at home and the capacity of hospitals, particularly intensive care units.

The Imperial model has played a key role in informing the UK’s coronavirus strategy, but this approach has been criticised by some. “To be fair, the Imperial people are the some of the best infectious disease modellers on the planet,” Paul Hunter at the University of East Anglia, UK, told ��è����Ƶ last week. “But it is risky to put all your eggs in a single basket.”

Ferguson said the current strategy was intended to keep transmission of the virus at low levels until a vaccine was available. Experts say that could take 12 to 18 months and Ferguson acknowledged it was impractical to keep the UK in lockdown for so long, especially because of the impact on the economy. “We’ll be paying for this year for decades to come,” he said.

The UK government is aiming to relax restrictions on people’s movements only when the country has the ability to test more people for the virus, said Ferguson. Some have criticised the UK for not following the advice of the World Health Organization to “test, test, test”. But Ferguson said community testing and contact tracing wasn’t included as a possible strategy in the original modelling because not enough tests were available.

He said the UK should have the testing capacity “within a few weeks” to copy what South Korea has done and aggressively test and trace the general population.

New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.

His comments come as a team at the University of Oxford released provisional findings of a different model that they say shows that up to . The model is based on different assumptions to those of Ferguson and others involved in advising the UK government.

Most importantly, it assumes that most people who contract the virus don’t show symptoms and that very few need to go to hospital. “I don’t think that’s consistent with the observed data,” Ferguson told the committee.

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Psychologists say they have produced the first rigorous analysis of why newly-wed heterosexual couples argue. Topping the list is that people feel their partner pays them inadequate attention or affection.

The other main sources of disagreement are based around sex, money, control, jealousy and housework. The psychologists have turned the results into a standardised list of questions they say could help couples and therapists get to the bottom of constant rows.

“Understanding the main reasons for disagreement in relationships, and what men and women perceive as disagreement, can help couples mitigate arguments by anticipating conflict,” says Guilherme Lopes, a psychologist at Oakland University, Michigan, who led the study.

His team first asked university students to nominate hundreds of topics they thought married couples might argue about. The suggestions ranged from the very serious, including abortion, to the stereotypical and trivial, such as which TV programmes to watch.

The team removed the suggestions they thought were irrelevant or redundant and then ran a list of the remaining 83 possibilities past 107 heterosexual couples from the local area who had married in the past year. For each topic, both partners were asked to grade how much they thought they rowed about it with their spouse.

The team then took the most popular answers and grouped them by theme into six principal reasons for conflict, rejecting those ideas that couples said rarely prompted disagreement. Perhaps not surprisingly, given they had been married less than a year, couples said they didn’t argue about dating other people. Neither did they disagree about what side of the bed to sleep on.

More common arguments focused on disputes such as who should pay for something, whose friends the couple sees more often, frequency of sex and who does more work. The psychologists took the most important 30 – grouped into those six principal themes – and now present them as a Reasons for Disagreement in Romantic Relationships Scale, which they say can help explain conflict between partners.

“I don’t think basic research can offer direct advice or tips to couples,” says Lopes. “But I believe that understanding sexual conflict can provide insights about a partner’s behaviours and a partner’s reactions to behaviours.”

The psychologists also asked each partner to rate how happily they were married and whether they were likely to have an affair. By cross-referencing these responses with the topics that men and women said they argued about the most, the study suggested that arguments about who was in control made wives unhappier than husbands.

The psychologists’ results are likely to cause some disagreements of their own. Gina Rippon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, says such self-reported findings can be biased by local, cultural factors.

She also takes issue with the way the study authors lean heavily on evolutionary psychology to explain differences between men and women. For instance, they argue that less attentive husbands trigger an innate “mate ejection” reaction in a wife who senses a man less willing to invest resources in her and her offspring.

“I would challenge them to provide detailed empirical data,” says Rippon. “Otherwise this smacks of another evo psych ‘just-so’ story.”