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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 Coro