The UK’s failure to do more to stop Covid spreading early in the pandemic was one of the worst ever public health failures, says MP’s, reports BBC.
About the report
Across 150 pages, the report covers a variety of successes and failings.
MPs call the pandemic, which has claimed more than 150,000 lives in the UK and nearly five million worldwide so far, the “biggest peacetime challenge” for a century.
The report predominantly focuses on the response to the pandemic in England. The committee did not look at steps taken individually by Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
The government approach was to try to manage the situation and in effect achieve herd immunity by infection, it said. This led to a delay in introducing the first lockdown, costing thousands of lives.
Some of the most serious early failings, the report suggests, resulted from apparent “groupthink” among scientists and ministers – which meant the UK was not as open to different approaches on earlier lockdowns, border controls and test and trace as it should have been.
The veil of ignorance through which the UK viewed the initial weeks of the pandemic was partly self-inflicted, said the report.
The report’s recommendations include :
- comprehensive government plans for future emergencies
- a bigger role for the armed forces in emergency response plans, and considering a government
- NHS volunteer reserve database.
MP’s opinion on the report
Tory MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the nature of the pandemic meant it was “impossible to get everything right”.
Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay said scientific advice had been followed and the government had made “difficult judgments” to protect the NHS.
He said the government took responsibility for everything that had happened and repeated the apology made by the prime minister in May for the country’s suffering.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the report was a “damning indictment” of the government and showed the errors and failures of running down the NHS before the pandemic.
He called on Boris Johnson to apologise to the bereaved and hold the public inquiry as soon as possible.
Asked who was accountable for mistakes made, Greg Clark, the chair of the Science and Technology Committee, said that in any democracy, politicians were accountable, but stressed that everyone – from the prime minister down – was trying to do the best they could.
Science minister George Freeman said it was too early for any proper discussion about blame or fault.
Asked about the higher UK death toll, he said: “A lot of that is actually to do with the very, very heavy obesity-related cardiometabolic chronic disease cohort that we’ve been carrying for years – that’s a failure of public health in this country over decades.”
Herd immunity
When Covid hit, the government’s approach was to manage its spread through the population rather than try to stop it – or herd immunity by infection as the report called it.
The report said this was based on dealing with a flu pandemic, and was done on the advice of its scientific advisers on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
But the idea was not challenged enough by ministers in any part of the UK, indicating a “degree of group-think”.
Asked whether herd immunity had been a policy in the early days, Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, said he did not think there was any desire for the whole population to be infected.
However, he said there was a “fatalism that it was likely that in the end, that will be the only way that we will stop the progress of the virus”.
The slow and gradualist approach
The committees said decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic – and the advice that led to them – ranked as “one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced”.
The advice from scientists changed on 16 March 2020, but it was only a week later that a lockdown was announced.
This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between ministers and their advisers, the report says.
The ‘slow and chaotic’ start for Test and Trace
The UK was one of the first countries in the world to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, but failed to translate that into an effective test-and-trace system during the first year of the pandemic.
Testing in the community stopped in March 2020 and for weeks during the first peak only those admitted to hospital were tested.
It was not until May that the NHS Test and Trace system was launched in England, but the report described its start as “slow, uncertain and often chaotic”.
But it did praise the target set by then Health Secretary Matt Hancock to get to 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, saying it played an important part in galvanising the system.
The vaccine rollout and other successes
The greatest praise though was reserved for the vaccination programme and the way the government supported the development of a number of vaccines, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.
It said the whole programme was one of the most effective initiatives in history, and will ultimately help to save millions of lives here and across the world.
The development of treatments, such as dexamethasone, for Covid through the UK Recovery Trial was another area where the UK’s response was genuinely world-leading, the report said.
And the NHS and government were also credited with the way hospital intensive care capacity was increased to ensure the majority who needed hospital treatment received it.
How certain groups fared worse
For ethnic minorities, there were a variety of factors, including possible biological reasons and increased exposure because of housing and working conditions.
For people with learning disabilities, not enough thought was given to how restrictions would have a detrimental impact on them – particularly in terms of accessing health care more generally. Do not resuscitate orders were also used inappropriately.
Lack of priority
There was a lack of priority attached to care homes too at the start of the pandemic.
The rapid discharge of people from hospital into care homes without adequate testing or isolation was a prime example of this.
This, combined with untested staff bringing infection into homes from the community, led to many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.
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Source: BBC
