How the UK prepared for the wrong pandemic

Even when Covid struck, the government and its health officials were confident about their ability to deal with it.

Dr Jenny Harries, then deputy chief medical officer for England, hailed the UK as an “international example” in its preparedness in one of the first televised press conferences.

She wasn’t alone in thinking this: after all, just a year before the pandemic, a government study had hailed our “world-leading capabilities.”

But such a belief, Baroness Hallett said as she presented the first of her Covid reports, was “dangerously wrong”.

The UK actually prepared for the wrong pandemic. How did it get here?

In 217 pages and more than 80,000 words, Baroness Hallett has presented a detailed and damning critique of how a decade of complacency, wasted opportunities and confused thinking has left the UK descending into a pandemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and caused lasting damage to the economy and society.

The initial cause of this disease dates back to the 2009 swine flu pandemic. This was another virus that spread rapidly around the world, but it turned out to be mild, partly because older people appeared to have some immunity due to previous exposure to a similar strain.

Baroness Hallett’s report claimed that this had “lulled” the UK into a false sense of security. Two years later, a new pandemic plan was drawn up. This strategy was not aimed at trying to massively suppress the pandemic virus, but rather at mitigating its inevitable spread by assuming that the effects would be moderate.

Since the strategy was based on influenza, it was hoped that vaccines could be quickly deployed and, in the meantime, that antiviral drugs could be used to lessen the severity of the disease.

But Covid was not a flu – and certainly not a mild flu.

The nine years from 2011 to the start of the Covid pandemic are also littered with missed opportunities.

The UK has not learned the lessons of East Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. They have used their experience of other coronavirus outbreaks, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), to put in place plans to rapidly scale up testing and tracing systems and introduce quarantine processes. Border control measures, including travel restrictions and testing, could also be deployed.

In contrast, the UK abandoned community testing in spring 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking off.

In his testimony for this module, Jeremy Hunt, who was Health Secretary from 2012 to 2018, went so far as to say that if we had learned from abroad, we might even have avoided the first lockdown.

But it’s not as if there was no attempt to learn from it.

In the 2010s, a number of training events were held, simulating influenza and coronavirus outbreaks, to test the UK’s preparedness.

An event in 2016, called Exercise Cygnus, identified worrying gaps in the response and plans were put in place to update them by 2018.

But this was not the case and, as of June 2020, only eight of the 22 recommendations made following this exercise had been implemented.

One reason given by the report for this lack of action is competing demands for Operation Yellowhammer, the UK government’s contingency plan in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

But the UK’s inertia cannot be blamed solely on Brexit. The counter-argument put forward by the previous government is that Brexit has given the UK more flexibility in other areas, such as stockpiling medicines and rolling out vaccines.

The way the pandemic planning system was set up also played a role. Baroness Hallett describes a labyrinthine system of committees, partnerships and councils responsible for civil emergency planning.

Decentralization, which means that health policy is the responsibility of each nation, has also complicated matters.

A diagram on page 19 of the report illustrates the problem better than words can.

To illustrate the complexity of the structures in place, the report includes a spaghetti diagram showing the various councils and agencies responsible for pandemics. There are more than 60 of them, with multiple lines of command.

This meant that there was no single body that was ultimately responsible.

But it was not only politicians and the system that contributed to the mistakes.

Scientists, so often praised at the start of the pandemic, also have a case to make, as Baroness Hallett’s report makes clear.

She said they had been infected by groupthink – no one questioned orthodoxy.

The advice was too narrowly targeted and took little account of the socio-economic impacts of the recommended measures.

He said ministers had not done enough to challenge what they were being told and there was not enough freedom or autonomy in the way the various advisory groups were set up for dissenting voices to be heard.

This narrowness of thinking and action was also present within Public Health England, the body responsible for health protection at the start of the pandemic.

Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, told the inquiry he never planned or pushed the government to introduce a system of mass testing.

That is why Baroness Hallett concluded that officials, experts and ministers must all take responsibility for what happened.