The forecast of 4,000 people dying per day from COVID-19 by next month could be four or five times too high and does not reflect the current situation, a leading Oxford professor has warned.

The incredible figure was presented by Sir Patrick Vallance during Saturday’s TV briefing where the Prime Minister announced the UK would be thrust into a second lockdown.

But it has emerged the forecasts are out of date and inaccurate, with SAGE accused of ‘misleading’ the public and MPs by cherry-picking the scariest data.

Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford said he ‘cannot understand why they have used this data’.

The 4,000 deaths per day forecast was based on the assumption of there being an average of 1,000 per day at the start of November. The real number is significantly lower, with 162 confirmed for yesterday in the whole UK.

The scenario of 4,000 deaths a day by December is based on there being an average of 1,000 deaths per day in the UK right now. In reality the daily average was 182 last week, according to Department of Health data.

Conservative MPs said they were worried the forecasts were ‘misleading’.

David Davis told the Telegraph: ‘The first responsibility of the scientific advisors to the Government is to give the truth to the public and not to cherry-pick the data.

‘This is a fairly major error on their part if they’ve used old data which effectively misleads the public.’

Steve Baker, who was initially support of a second lockdown, said: ‘This evidence does appear to indicate that the death models are already wrong and by quite a considerable margin.’

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