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Ian Sinclair and Rupert Read provide a comprehensive countdown to how Britain came to have one of the highest COVID-19 per capita death rates in the world.
Speaking on the BBC’s Question Time on 26 March 2020, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described the Government’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic as “a national scandal”. Here is a look through the key moments which explain why.
October 2016: Exercise Cygnus, a three-day training exercise on how to deal with a pandemic, is carried out, involving all major Government departments, the NHS and local authorities. “It showed gaping holes in Britain’s Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response plan.” A report on the exercise has never been published, with a senior former Government source with direct involvement saying that the findings were deemed “too terrifying” to be revealed. A senior academic directly involved in Exercise Cygnus and the current pandemic said: “These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this – but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.” (Sunday Telegraph)
14 September 2017: A National Risk Register Of Civil Emergencies is published by the Cabinet Office. The report notes that “there is a high probability of a flu pandemic occurring” with “up to 50% of the UK population experiencing symptoms, potentially leading to between 20,000 and 750,000 fatalities and high levels of absence from work”. (Cabinet Office)
30 July 2018: A UK biological security strategy is published, addressing the threat of pandemics. It “was not properly implemented, according to a former Government chief scientific advisor… Prof Sir Ian Boyd, who advised the environment department for seven years until last August and was involved in writing the strategy, said a lack of resources was to blame”. (Guardian)
2 January 2020: “Chinese authorities have launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia which has infected dozens of people in the central city of Wuhan”. (BBC News)
Mid-January 2020: “From about mid-January onwards, it was absolutely obvious that this was serious, very serious”, notes John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling and a key advisor to the Government. (Reuters)
21 January 2020: “China’s health ministry has confirmed human-to-human transmission of a mysterious Sars-like virus that has spread across the country and fuelled anxiety about the prospect of a major outbreak as millions begin travelling for lunar new year celebrations”. (Guardian)
23 January 2020: China implements a lockdown in Wuhan province, the centre of the outbreak. All transport into and out of the city is stopped (with no exceptions even for personal and medical emergencies), shops, schools and universities are closed, public transport halted, and private vehicles barred from the roads without special permission. (Guardian)
24 January 2020: A group of Chinese doctors and scientists publish an article in the Lancet medical journal titled ‘Clinical Features of Patients Infected With 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China’ (Lancet). According to Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, the study showed “that a third of patients require admission to intensive care, and 29% get so bad that they need ventilation”. (Guardian)
26 January 2020: Nassim Taleb and two colleagues publish a note with the New England Complex Systems Institute urging a robust precautionary response to the outbreak. “Policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to ‘paranoia’, or the converse a belief that nothing can be done,” they conclude. (New England Complex Systems Institute)
30 January 2020: The World Health Organisation (WHO) declares that the Coronavirus is a “public health emergency of international concern”. (Guardian)
31 January 2020: Professor Joseph Wu, of the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, co-authors an article in the Lancet medical journal about the Coronavirus outbreak in China. The authors note that “independent self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of presymptomatic cases and in the absence of large-scale public health interventions. Preparedness plans and mitigation interventions should be readied for quick deployment globally”. (Lancet). “British officials took part in four meetings where EU projects to bulk-buy medical kit were discussed – the earliest in January, according to official minutes… At this [31 January 2020] meeting, four EU member states said the virus could require increased stocks in Europe of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, masks and goggles, and the commission said it was ready to help if asked… the UK had decided not to participate in any of four EU procurement schemes to buy medical equipment in response to the Coronavirus crisis.” (Guardian)
13 February 2020: Between 13 February and 30 March the UK misses a total of eight conference calls or meetings about the Coronavirus between EU heads of state or health ministers. (Reuters)
24 February 2020: At a press conference in Beijing, the WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19 highlights how China “rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” to fight the spread of Coronavirus (WHO). Rupert Read sends a briefing to a senior member of the Government, urging the adoption of the kind of strong precautionary measures laid out in Taleb et al’s 24 January note. The Government response to Read is non-committal.
26 February 2020: A memo from the Government’s National Security Communications Team warns that, in a worst-case-scenario, half a million Britons could die from the Coronavirus. (Mirror)
Late February 2020: According to a Sunday Times report, at a private event, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings, outlined the Government’s strategy at the time in a way that was summarised by someone present as “herd immunity,