The House of Commons and Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee have published their Report, Coronavirus: lessons learned to date, examining the initial UK response to the covid pandemic.
As the Committees report (and I reproduce this to give balance to what follows):
Some initiatives were examples of global best practice but others represented mistakes. Both must be reflected on to ensure that lessons are applied to better inform future responses to emergencies.
In particular:
- The forward-planning, agility and decisive organisation of the vaccine development and deployment effort will save millions of lives globally and should be a guide to future Government practice;
- The delays in establishing an adequate test, trace and isolate system hampered efforts to understand and contain the outbreak and it failed in its stated purpose to avoid lockdowns;
- The initial decision to delay a comprehensive lockdown—despite practice elsewhere in the world—reflected a fatalism about the spread of covid that should have been robustly challenged at the time;
- Social care was not given sufficient priority in the early stages of the pandemic;
- The experience of the covid pandemic underlines the need for an urgent and long term strategy to tackle health inequalities; and
- The UK's preparedness for a pandemic had been widely acclaimed in advance, but performed less well than many other countries in practice.
The 38 recommendations made, if implemented by the Government and by public bodies such as the NHS, would ensure that during the remaining period of the pandemic and in any new emergency, the UK could perform better by having distilled lessons—positive and negative—from the UK's initial response to covid.
The key issue was, it turned out, a simple one. Despite the evidence that action was required the UK believed in herd immunity. The report says:
In the first three months the strategy reflected official scientific advice to the Government which was accepted and implemented. When the Government moved from the ‘contain' stage to the ‘delay' stage, that approach involved trying to manage the spread of covid through the population rather than to stop it spreading altogether. This amounted in practice to accepting that herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome, given that the United Kingdom had no firm prospect of a vaccine, limited testing capacity and there was a widespread view that the public would not accept a lockdown for a significant period. The UK, along with many other countries in Europe and North America made a serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and South East Asian countries. The fact that the UK approach reflected a consensus between official scientific advisers and the Government indicates a degree of groupthink that was present at the time which meant we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been.
In other words, people died because what was glaringly obviously necessary was not done.
I still hope that prosecution are brought. I see no reason why those who caused the unnecessary early deaths of tens of thousands of people should be allowed to get away with having done so.
This was not the only error though. This is pretty grim reading:
The Government and the NHS both failed adequately to recognise the significant risks to the social care sector at the beginning of the pandemic. Until the social care working group was established in May 2020, SAGE either did not have sufficient representation from social care or did not give enough weight to the impact on the social care sector. Without such input and broader expertise, Ministers lacked important advice when making crucial decisions. This, coupled with staff shortages, a lack of sufficient testing and PPE, and the design of care settings to enable communal living hampered isolation and infection control, meant that some care providers were unable to respond to risks as effectively as they should. This had devastating and preventable repercussions for people receiving care and their families and put staff providing social care at risk.
That last sentence is the charge sheet. Johnson, Hancock, Whitty and Valance all have cases to answer. Three of them are still in places of authority. In all three cases that astonishes me. But it does explain why the errors are continuing.
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The Prime Minister delayed decisions to lock down on at least three separate occasions. His decisions alone have cost tens of thousands of lives. Avoidable deaths for which he personally is responsible.
Even today, when pubs and other crowded venues are open and masks have been abandoned by many, deaths are running at over 100 per day; 8000 more since the beginning of August. Mostly older people who are fully vaccinated. We are just letting the virus circulate and just letting the vulnerable die.
Not to mention the thousands and thousands of unvaccinated children we are deliberately allowing to be infected every day. Very few will die, but there will be a significant minority who suffer long term health problems. Why aren’t they vaccinated yet? Why aren’t we taking other simple precautions?
And then the base corruption, with billions being handed out to friends and family of politicians. The expensive farce of track and trace. Millions wasted on unsuitable PPE.
It is shameful.
Agreed
The £37 billion cost of “Track & Trace” should have been used for providing everyone in the UK with the best quality masks available, particularly NHS staff and mandating the wearing of masks is all public places.
The huge importance of good quality face masks was not recognised and/or accpted by SAGE. Coronavirus infections are spread by aerosols as well as larger exhaled droplets.
In March/April 2020 I identified N95/FFP3 masks/respirators without valves as the essential part of our personal armoury against infection. I was able to do this this because I trained as a microbiologist and I used to be a food industry Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point (HACCP) analyst, trainer and auditor. https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/hazard-analysis-and-critical-control-point-haccp
In the food industry, the points critical to food safety must be identified in every food production process and measures put into place to eliminate or at best minimise all risks to the ultimate consumer. The Food Safety Act demands that without such due diligence there is no defence against prosecution for food safety offences.
I applied HACCP principles to Covid 19 infection and identified best quality masks as essential as the first line of defence for personal protection. Consequently, we always wear FFP3 masks in shops etc. and crowded streets.
It is indefensible that FFP3 masks were not provided for all staff working in hospitals with Covid patients. The HSE reported in 2008 that for aerosols, surgical masks “might not sufficiently reduce the likelihood of transmission via this route”. https://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr619.pdf.
The precautionary principle should have been applied by SAGE and accepted by Boris and the cabinet from the outset.
I was surprised and shocked to see that new infections in Germany (with 15 million more people) averaged a bit over 8,000 a day, although rising. France, with a slightly small population, less than five thousand. We are now hitting 40,000 a day.
The BBC did show comparisons on the health section of their website, but otherwise I have not seen anything on the Mainstream media. That is less surprising.
Some European countries have now overtaken us in vaccinations. It seems we won’t be “World beating’ any more.
This article – and notably the maps – in today’s Guardian speaks volumes:
“UK’s high Covid case rates buck trend as western Europe outperforms east”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/11/covid-rates-lower-western-europe-than-central-and-eastern
My reading of the summary of the report suggests that one of the glaring errors, that of top down planning (aka command economy) has not been addressed. Local systems, starved of resources, we’re unable to respond. Centralised systems, always slow to respond, failed.
There had been an attempt to plan for this through the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. This did not meet the current government demands for control freakery, and was replaced.
Absolutely. The (Conservative) Lansley reforms removed any local public health strategic planning – which was actively doing contingency planning in 2003 (SARS) and 2009 (H1N1) ready to respond should those infections hit the UK (they interacted with me as part of that). And the successive real terms funding cuts under Lansley and Hunt (he can’t be excused from blame for his role on the select committee) meant the NHS had no choice but to cut corners, which included reducing intensive care beds to a level which made the country vulnerable to a surge in infectious disease.
At the same time, analyses in hindsight are always going to find it difficult to appreciate the difficulty in clear decision making right at the beginning when so little was known about Covid – information was circulating which by its nature was partial, for example there was quite a long time before it was clearly established that a lot of Covid was being transmitted asymptomatically. Best advice was changing almost by the day, and for good reason. (Nevertheless, by early March it had become clear that the best available tool for infection control was reducing human contacts).
Exercise Cygnus, 2017, a Government review of preparedness for a (long expected) pandemic set the scene.
“The report on Exercise Cygnus, the simulation of a fictitious influenza pandemic, warned that ‘the UK’s preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies, and capability, is currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors.'” (Calre Dyer, BMJ, November, 2020)
Quite….
And how the mundane murderers get rewarded.
Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock given United Nations role
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58890485
Do we need say more?
I can only agree whole heartedly.
Already I’m hearing that difficulties with Covid are ‘old excuses’ now as if it’s over.
‘The Government and the NHS’ share the blame apparently?
But is not the NHS the Government as well? It’s successive Governments who have been moulding and paying for it (or not).
I worry that the NHS is being dragged down by (sorry) the scumbag politicians who refuse to fund it properly.
I think that this aspect of the report is one that we need to be wary of. I saw the same problem in the book ‘Failures of State’ which was otherwise extremely good.
The fact that this committee is doing the same thing is deeply worrying to me. It’s like the fox blaming the farmer for having chickens.
Making the NHS look bad is a sure fire precursor to more privatisation leading to exploitation. Mark my words.
I entirely agree
I must blog this…
Agreed. We saw this in how the government claimed the credit for vaccine development, procurement and delivery. The former was academia, substantially publicly funded and the latter solely down to the NHS. With procurement, just for once they did give the job to someone with relevant knowledge in the field. A rare exception.
The NHS and hospitals did a fantastic job in massively reconfiguring their operations to handle the influx of patients. I’d challenge any private sector business to do as much. They have been given little or no credit for it. Failures of State is a horror show and outlines the case for the prosecution of those leading the current government- and some of their predecessors who have rundown the NHS.
The claim is also made that the public would not put up with restrictions for very long when in practice the public turned out to be ahead of and more cautious than the government.
So whose ‘advice’ was this based on? Or was it an assumption or assertion of the selfish libertarians in government who struggle to conceive of taking any action that would benefit others whilst (mildly) inconveniencing themselves?
I don’t buy it. As we’ve learned, there has been a lot of distortion or very selective use of ‘science’ to suit Johnson and co’s personal agendas.
The things is Robin if you read the reviews of Failures of State on Amazon, people think that the Government AND the NHS let them down with no inkling that the latter is driven by poor planning and effective cuts in financial support from Government going back to 2010, plus the staffing crisis caused by BREXIT.
A very clever game of misrepresentation is being played – it is the British way remember. Cast you mind back to Beeching when he was cutting the railway network. Not only did he misrepresent the income on certain lines (ignoring how branch line journeys fed into the main network, favouring point to point on them instead) but if BR wanted to get rid of a line, it would be allocated the worst rolling stock, most beat up unreliable engines and be filthy to boot. Patronage would shrink and the consent to get rid was manufactured.
Manufacturing consent is the British way of winding itself down – from railways to BREXIT to the NHS. Successive Governments have been masters at it as they renege on the promises it made after World War II.
Agreed on Beeching …. Decidedly dubious
Which in turn goes back to the success of the Conservatives in blaming the financial crisis on Labour and using it to justify austerity. Part of that being the undoing of all the progress that had been made under Blair/Brown (boo, hiss) in rebuilding the NHS after the Thatcher years. Its the same game being played again.
I await the Opposition, any of them, truly putting the boot in and challenging the narrative. They’ve just gone along with it. Be it Covid, Brexit or public services. They have nothing to lose now and I have to believe that the public, a hard core apart (including a section of historic Labour voters) are shifting too.
I’ll admit to a sneaking sympathy for Angela Rayners little ‘outburst’. Certainly expressed how I feel.