Government’s early Covid strategy was ‘one of the most important public health failures’ UK has ever seen
The Government and its scientific advisers have been lambasted by a report from MPs, which concluded serious errors and delays cost lives to Covid.
Ministers waited too long before introducing lockdown measures at the start of the pandemic, according to the science and technology committee and the health and social care committee.
The UK’s pandemic preparation was too “narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model,” which ignored lessons learned from Sars, Mers and Ebola.
Former chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies told MPs there was “groupthink”, with infectious disease experts not believing that “Sars, or another Sars, would get from Asia to us”.
The UK’s national risk register, a pre-pandemic institution, said only up to 100 people may die during any outbreak of an emerging infectious disease.
It also said “the likelihood of an emerging infectious disease spreading within the UK is assessed to be lower than that of a pandemic flu”.
MPs said the UK’s “gradual and incremental” policy approach in response to Covid’s emergence in China had been proved to be “wrong.” A slow implementation of lockdown and social distancing measures caused a higher death toll, the report concluded.
The MPs said the “decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic – and the advice that led to them – rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”.
While attempting to achieve herd immunity was not an official government strategy, there was a “policy approach of fatalism about the prospects for Covid in the community”.
Officials looked to “only moderate the speed of infection” through the population.
The report stated: “The policy was pursued until March 23 because of the official scientific advice the Government received, not in spite of it.”
Figures including Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, and members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said in the weeks prior to the country’s third lockdown it was not possible to totally suppress the virus.
Only in the days leading up to the March 23 lockdown announcement did government officials and advisers have “simultaneous epiphanies that the course the UK was following was wrong, possibly catastrophically so,” MPs said.
The decision not to test people discharged from hospitals to care homes early on was a failure and led to deaths, they added.
A regional tier system introduced in autumn 2020 was deemed confusing for the public, with MPs arguing that it was not “watertight” enough to prevent infection spreading.