Covid 19 pandemic is long gone but Britain is still smarting from its consequences. Recent inquiry produces 10 bombshells of ineptitudes and ill preparedness
The Covid-19 Inquiry found that the UK Government had ‘failed’ its citizens with a lack of pandemic preparedness leading to deaths and suffering across the country
The UK Government ‘failed’ its citizens due to being ill-prepared for the “foreseeable” Covid-19 pandemic, a damning report has revealed.
A string of failures from those in charge led to deaths and suffering across the country as coronavirus took grip of society in 2020.
Covid Inquiry chair Heather Hallett, in her first report into the handling of the pandemic, warned that “never again” can a disease be allowed to tear through the UK in the way Covid-19 did.
In her report, Baroness Hallett painted a picture of a chaotic Government, where “jargon” was used to cover up incomplete tasks, outdated pandemic plans were abandoned and test and trace systems were inadequate.
On a sobering day for those in Government, ministers were told “it is not a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will strike but ‘when'” as they were warned to accept her recommendations.
Keir Starmer promised the nation the lessons would be learned “to protect and prepare us from the impact of any future pandemic”.
The Covid-19 inquiry, which is expected to continue until 2026, is split up into several modules, with more reports due in the future.
The Mirror has rounded up 10 of the key bombshells from the first report into whether the UK was prepared for the pandemic.
The UK was ‘dangerously mistaken’ to believe it was prepared.
The inquiry found:
1. Government ‘failed its citizens’
Inquiry chair Baroness Hallett was scathing about the Tory Government, bluntly concluding that UK citizens were “failed” by the Government and civil service.
Her report found there was a “damaging absence of focus” on the measures and infrastructure that would be needed to deal with a fast-spreading disease, even though a coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale “was foreseeable”.
“I have no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures across the UK failed the citizens of all four nations,” Baroness Hallett said.
“There were serious errors on the part of the state and serious flaws in our civil emergency systems. This cannot be allowed to happen again.”
2. Too many deaths
Baroness Hallett told of the “harrowing testimony of loss and grief given by bereaved witnesses”, adding: “There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.” Covid-19 was linked to 235,000 deaths and came after a decade of Tory austerity policies which had shrunk the public sector.
The report added: “The massive financial, economic and human cost of the Covid-19 pandemic is proof that, in the area of preparedness and resilience, money spent on systems for our protection is vital and will be vastly outweighed by the cost of not doing so.”
3. Government ‘dangerously mistaken’ thinking it was prepared
The UK was “dangerously mistaken” to believe that it was one of the best prepared countries in the world to respond to a pandemic, Baroness Hallett said.
In 2019, it was widely believed in Britain and abroad that the UK was “not only properly prepared but was one of the best-prepared countries in the world to respond to a pandemic,” she said. “This belief was dangerously mistaken. In reality, the UK was ill-prepared for dealing with the whole-system civil emergency of a pandemic, let alone the coronavirus pandemic that actually struck.”
4. Austerity left NHS vulnerable
The inquiry chair said a decade of austerity had left Britain vulnerable, and the NHS running “close to, if not beyond capacity” even before the pandemic struck.
Baroness Hallett said: “In 2020 the UK lacked resilience. Going into the pandemic, there had been a slowdown in health improvement and health inequalities had widened.
“High pre-existing levels of heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and obesity and general levels of ill health meant that the UK was more vulnerable. Public services, particularly health and social care, were running close to, if not beyond, capacity in normal times.”
Inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett said UK citizens were ‘failed’ by those in charge.
5. Severe staff shortages in hospitals
The report raises the alarm about the state of the NHS, which was plagued by shortages and infrastructure issues. This meant medics were unable to contain the virus when it took hold.
Baroness Hallett wrote: “The Inquiry also heard that there were severe staff shortages and that a significant amount of the hospital infrastructure was not fit for purpose. England’s social care sector faced similar issues. This combination of factors had a directly negative impact on infection control measures and on the ability of the NHS and the care sector to ‘surge up’ during a pandemic.”
6. UK prepared for ‘wrong pandemic’
The damning report found that the Government had prepared for the “wrong pandemic”. Focus had been put on getting ready for a flu outbreak, but preparedness for a pandemic like Covid was “inadequate”. Baroness Hallett wrote: “The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. The significant risk of an influenza pandemic had long been considered, written about and planned for. However, that preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck.”
Former Tory health secretaries Jeremy Hunt, Matt Hancock and Andrew Lansley were blamed for adhering to a flawed 2011 pandemic strategy which assumed the next pandemic would be flu. “The UK government’s sole pandemic strategy, from 2011, was outdated and lacked adaptability. It was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with the pandemic,” it said. “It focused on only one type of pandemic, failed adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response, and paid insufficient attention to the economic and social consequences of pandemic response.”
7. Lack of leadership for years before Covid
The damning report found a string of leadership failures and it said that ministers did not challenge the advice they were being given. It also specifically criticised a use of “jargon and euphemism to disguise…tasks that had not been completed”.
In her conclusion, Baroness Hallett wrote: “In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight. Ministers, who are frequently untrained in the specialist field of civil contingencies, were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers.”
The report added that scientific committees advising ministers may have been affected by “groupthink”, that experts were limited in what they could advise, and “expert advice on pandemic preparedness was overly weighted in favour of biomedical science”.
8. Brexit made us less prepared
The report found that “limited resources” was a “widely recurring theme in evidence” and that the UK had been made more vulnerable by Brexit. It said government planning for a no-deal Brexit caused resources to be allocated away from pandemic preparedness.
It said: “This was no better highlighted than when several witnesses from the UK government and devolved administrations told the inquiry that a number of workstreams for pandemic preparedness were paused due to a reallocation of resources to Operation Yellowhammer.” Operation Yellowhammer was the codename used by government for civil contingency planning for the possibility of Brexit without an EU withdrawal agreement.
9. Impact of deprivation overlooked
Social, health and racial differences were not considered in planning processes, the inquiry found. The report bluntly concluded: “Emergency planning generally failed to account sufficiently for the pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation in society.
“There was also a failure to appreciate the full extent of the impact of government measures and long-term risks, from both the pandemic and the response, on ethnic minority communities and those with poor health or other vulnerabilities, as well as a failure to engage appropriately with those who know their communities best, such as local authorities, the voluntary sector and community groups.”
Widespread contact tracing was abandoned early on in the pandemic due to a lack of tests and contact tracers.
10. Test and trace was for small outbreak
The Health Protection Agency published a report in 2005 stating there was “limited capacity within the public health system to surge staff resources in the event of a prolonged outbreak”.
The inquiry confirmed planning had not evolved by 2020, concluding: “The entirety of the UK’s testing and contact tracing system was therefore designed to deal only with a small number of cases of emerging infectious diseases.” Widespread contact tracing was abandoned early on in the pandemic due to a lack of tests and contact tracers.
Baroness Hallett further criticised the lack of a test, trace and isolate system in the UK. “One of the first lines of defence to a pandemic is containment and this requires a system of test, trace and isolate that can be rapidly scaled up to meet the demands of a major outbreak,” she said. “This did not exist in the UK when the Covid- 19 pandemic struck.”
Source: The Mirror
