The UK’s first Covid lockdown may have been avoided if the country had put more effort into quarantining at the start of the pandemic, former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.
Hunt, now Chancellor, was giving evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry about the country’s planning for a pandemic during his time as Health Secretary between 2012 and 2018.
He told the hearing Britain “hadn’t given nearly enough thought” to the prospect of a coronavirus pandemic, focusing instead on planning for the spread of influenza.
And he conceded that a 2016 exercise – codenamed Cygnus – had been “too narrowly focused” on handling hundreds of thousands of deaths from a pandemic, rather than asking how it could be stopped in the first place.
“I don’t think we were asking the right questions”, he said.
Hunt said he believes the Government did not learn lessons from East Asian countries such as South Korea about the importance of quarantining to stop the spread of virus.
“If there was one thing that could have slowed the progress of Covid when it actually arrived, it was to understand the importance of early quarantining to stop the disease spreading, and to understand there are types of pandemic where it is worth putting a massive amount of effort into slowing the spread”, he said.
“One of the very first (questions) we should have been asking ourselves is, ‘is this one of those pandemics that you can actually slow and save lives early on or not?’ And I don’t think we had asked those questions.”
Speaking about the arrival of Covid in the UK, Hunt said by May 2020 transmission had “increased to about 5,000 a day, and then it was inevitable that you were going to have to use a lockdown”.
“Had we got on the case much earlier with that approach, we might have avoided that”, he said.
In his evidence, Hunt said “groupthink” was responsible for the focus of Exercise Cygnus, which did not look into coronavirus pandemics and only considered scenarios where a pandemic had hit the country and was spreading rapidly.
“Looking back with the benefit of hindsight – this was not what I thought at the time and I, with retrospect of course – I wish I had challenged at the time”, he said.
“But there were no questions asked at any stage as to how do we stop it getting to the stage of 200-400,000 fatalities.
“It was an assumption that if there was pandemic flu, it would spread, using layman’s terms like wildfire, and you pretty much couldn’t stop it.”
Hunt added: “We hadn’t given nearly enough thought to other types of pandemic which might emerge. With the benefit of hindsight, that was a wholly mistaken assumption.”
Hunt also told the Inquiry there was a wrong assumption within government and beyond that the UK was well-prepared for a possible pandemic.
“There was another assumption that we were very good at dealing with pandemics. We all thought it”, he said.
“By the way, it wasn’t just us. Johns Hopkins University in America said that the UK was the second best prepared country in the world in the global health security index in 2019.
“They had subcategories and one of their subcategories was which countries were best prepared for preventing the spread of a virus and scaling up treatment quickly, and we were top. We weren’t second best, we were top.
“And so there was I think a completely wrong assumption and I think the truth is we were very well prepared for pandemic flu because we had put a lot of thinking into it.”
