How SAGE & COBR work - by a former SAGE member
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-a-former-member-of-sage-explains-how-the-science-advisory-group-really-works-134077
When an emergency happens in the UK
the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), which sits in the Cabinet Office, the central government department responsible for the organisation of government,
calls and organises COBR.
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The CCS prepares a briefing for COBR, known as a CRIP, the Common Recognised Information Picture.
This is the basis upon which all discussions and decision are made.
It ensures that everybody involved is working off the same information.
SAGE is established at the request of COBR
and it is normally chaired by the government’s chief scientific adviser - at present, this is Patrick Vallance.
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The advice from SAGE contributes to the briefing and the chair of SAGE attends COBR.
When SAGE is called, it is the job of the Government Office for Science to bring together the necessary range of expertise to formulate advice to COBR.
When time is short, this expertise normally comes from scientists in government departments, especially their own chief scientists.
But when time permits, SAGE pulls in expertise from around the country
including, in the case of something like COVID-19, epidemiologists, clinicians, virologists, behavioural scientists, systems scientists and engineers.
The job of SAGE is to respond to questions from COBR
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For COVID-19, the complexity of the response is such that SAGE has to rely on other established groups to help it with formulating its advice.
For example, it uses the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group,
Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling in the Department for Health and Social Care,
and the independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours.
These groups, which have deep specialists in various important aspects of disease control as their members,
many of whom come from universities, have been thinking about pandemics for many years.
Some of them run computer models of how the disease might spread.
SAGE has the job of integrating the information from these disparate sources and of augmenting advice where necessary if it recognises any gaps.
This is a pyramidal system that takes an immense amount of technical information
and boils it down to the essentials needed to inform both the strategic and tactical thinking going on at COBR.
It is at COBR that the scientific advice is pitted against other forms of advice from the economic, security, political, administrative and diplomatic spheres.