The pandemic: what went wrong, what went well, what needs to be done
Regent Street, London, 13 April 2020 (Alamy)
We have seen the pattern before. In war and peace, in sickness and in health, Britain starts badly, then recovers itself and finishes strongly. The first official inquiry into the Covid pandemic, carried out jointly by two Commons select committees, confirms that this is indeed what happened over the last 18 months.
Two experienced former Cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, sum up the unanimous conclusions of 22 cross-party MPs thus: “The UK response has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both…”
Their report, which runs to 150 pages, is critical of governmental “group-think”, not only in Whitehall but in the scientific community too. Britain reacted much too slowly to the pandemic, failed to think outside its influenza paradigm by learning from East Asian countries, pursued “herd immunity” for too long, failed to protect residents of care homes and made heavy weather of testing from the start. NHS Test and Trace is castigated as “slow, uncertain and often chaotic”, while the system was slow to address higher death rates among ethnic minorities and discrimination against those with learning difficulties.
Yet this long catalogue of errors was redeemed, at least to some extent, by the remarkable success of Britain’s world-leading vaccination programme and innovations in treatment of Covid patients. The rapid development and roll out of the AstraZeneca vaccine — uniquely sold at cost price — to more than a billion people has prevented deaths all around the world. Here in the UK, at least 130,000 lives are estimated to have been saved by vaccination and some 23 million infections prevented. Drugs and care techniques pioneered in Britain have played a key role in dramatically lowering death rates of Covid patients.
As so often in the past, British scientific and medical professionals have been global leaders in dealing with a deadly threat to humanity. While the criticisms are serious and the lessons learned warrant urgent action, we should not feel ashamed of what our country has done. The Covid crisis was as unexpected in origin as it was overwhelming in scale. It took many weeks before basic facts about the coronavirus were established and by then it was too late. The use of lockdowns remains controversial, but the MPs’ report notably does not criticise the Government for following scientific advice to impose them as the only way of suppressing the spread of the virus.
The main action points include setting up a permanent “surge capacity” in the NHS, to enable hospitals to cope with a sudden rise in admissions. This sounds easier than it is in practice, but we need to ask why a centralised state-funded health service, which in theory should have been better at co-ordinating its response than those of other countries, in practice proved less flexible. The pandemic ought to prompt a debate about moving away from the outdated postwar NHS model towards the more modern insurance-based systems preferred by almost all other countries in the West. But a report authored by MPs from the Conservative, Labour and Scottish National parties — none of which dares to question the NHS — was never going to recommend such radical thinking.
Instead, they propose that the Government set up a standing office “to scan the horizon for future threats”. Any crisis management should include experts from abroad who could challenge ministerial or civil service group-think. Like every other inquiry after a major disaster, this one warns that the UK must never again be caught unawares. Unfortunately, we are usually guilty of fighting the last war or, in this case, the last pandemic. By definition, it is difficult to foresee events that have no precedent. Our intelligence services, who despite much mockery are not unintelligent, have failed to predict almost every major crisis of the last half century from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Taliban triumph in Afghanistan. The Government’s new “horizon scanners” should have plenty of advantages over the prophets and seers of old, but that does not mean their predictions will be more accurate. Human beings are hardwired to learn from experience, which is why we place such a premium on novelty. But not even artificial intelligence has discovered a reliable way to foresee the future — not yet, anyway. The need, surely, is as much for rapid reaction as it is for prescience.
The question remains: should the leadership of the Government be held accountable for the failure to impose lockdown and social distancing in the first few weeks of the pandemic? The report damns these early decisions — and, crucially, the advice on which they were based — as “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”. The buck stops with the Prime Minister and his closest colleagues. Some of those who played a key part in March 2020 have already gone, but Boris Johnson remains. When he returns from a well-earned break to face the House of Commons next week, he will have some explaining to do. He needs not merely to justify his actions, but to own up to the mistakes, avoidable as well as unavoidable, that were undoubtedly made. The country has, to a considerable extent, already forgiven these errors, but it has not forgotten them. We need to be confident that the Government has learned from the past so that the nation will be more secure for the future.
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