Significant failings in the UK’s preparation for a pandemic meant Covid caused more deaths and long-lasting economic damage than it should have, the first report from the Covid-19 inquiry has concluded.
The damning findings identified by the inquiry was that the Governments of the UK and devolved nations planned for the wrong pandemic, with too narrow a focus on flu.
There was also a flawed approach to risk assessment and a failure to learn from past emergency exercises and other disease outbreaks, inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett said.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, there had been a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight, the report concluded.
Previous health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock were both criticised for their failure to better prepare and oversee contingency planning.
Baroness Hallett also noted that going into the pandemic the UK ‘lacked resilience’ with a slowdown in health improvement and widening health inequalities.
‘High pre-existing levels of heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and obesity, and general levels of ill-health and health inequalities, meant that the UK was more vulnerable,’ the report said.
In addition, public services, particularly health and social care, ‘were running close to, if not beyond, capacity in normal times’.
Ministers were also criticised for not receiving a broad enough range of scientific advice and failing to challenge the advice they did get.
Repeated pandemic exercises had identified a lack of PPE, provision for contact tracing and testing and NHS surge capacity as issues, the report said.
The swine flu pandemic had also lulled the Government ‘into a false sense of security’.
It was vital that lessons were learned, the inquiry found, because it is not
a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will strike but ‘when’ and the next one will potentially happen in the near to medium future and be even more transmissible and lethal.
The report – the first of 9 separate modules looking at everything from healthcare systems, to vaccines, procurement and test, trace and isolate – made 10 recommendations which Baroness Hallett said she expected to be acted on.
They include:
- A ‘radical simplification’ of civil emergency preparedness and resilience systems, streamlining the current bureaucracy and improving leadership.
- A new approach to risk assessment for more comprehensive evaluation of a wider range of risks as well as better data collection and research
- Holding a UK-wide pandemic response at least every three years and publishing the outcome
- Using external expertise from outside government and the civil service to challenge ‘groupthink’
- And the creation of a single, independent statutory body responsible for whole system preparedness and response
Baroness Hallett said: ‘My report recommends fundamental reform of the way in which the UK government and the devolved administrations prepare for whole-system civil emergencies.
‘If the reforms I recommend are implemented, the nation will be more resilient and better able to avoid the terrible losses and costs to society that the Covid-19 pandemic brought.’
But a spokesperson for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said the report did not go far enough in setting out how the UK can improve the inequalities laid bare by the inquiry.
‘While the inquiry has diagnosed much of what undermined our response, Lady Hallett has not gone far enough in setting out how we can challenge, address and improve inequalities and capacity of public services as opposed to just understanding the effects of these failures.
‘We ask for this government to produce a plan to address health inequalities and in its first 100 days conduct a cross-departmental audit into pandemic preparedness.
Responding to the publication, BMA council chair Professor Philip Banfield said: ‘This report reveals in all its true horror how appallingly under-prepared the governments were for the pandemic, that processes failed us as citizens, and that lives could have been saved.’
He added that the report lays bare how, time and time again, ministers were told that we simply did not have enough staff or resources to cope with the predictable huge surge in demand for healthcare that a pandemic would bring.
The failure to learn from emergency planning exercises and previous outbreaks ‘led to an excess loss of life and to thousands of doctors and other healthcare staff being put at unimaginable risk on a daily basis for two years’, he added.
‘As the report makes clear, we already had a relatively unhealthy population and widening health inequalities when the pandemic struck, which meant they were the hardest hit.’
‘This unhealthy population was exacerbated by years of disinvestment and disinterest in public health by the Government.
‘The report shows how that disinterest continued, even during the pandemic, when ministers failed to engage with public health specialists and utilise their expertise – particularly on test and trace options.’
The UK remains poorly equipped, understaffed and underprepared to manage a future pandemic when it comes, he added.
