The UK could have avoided a Covid lockdown if it had prepared better for a pandemic, Jeremy Hunt has argued, saying there was too much focus on a fast-spreading flu-type illness and an assumption that Britain “knew this stuff best”.
Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, told the Covid public inquiry that he took some responsibility for what he called the “deeply entrenched” planning assumption that it would be impossible to stop the spread of a pandemic.
So embedded was this idea, he said, that a 2016 pandemic exercise called Exercise Cygnus started from the base point of at least 200,000 deaths, with Hunt being asked by officials whether he would be hypothetically willing to empty every intensive care bed in the UK so nursing staff could save more lives in the community.
“There were no questions asked at any stage as to how do we stop it getting to the stage of 200,000 to 400,000 fatalities,” Hunt, now the chancellor, told the hearing. “It was an assumption that if there was pandemic flu it would spread, using layperson’s terms, like wildfire. And you pretty much couldn’t stop it.”
He added: “I think there was a group-think that we knew this stuff best. There was a sense that, perhaps with the exception of the United States, there wasn’t an enormous amount we could learn from other countries.”
Hunt said the UK could have looked to countries such as South Korea, which had prepared better for the possible arrival of a non-flu respiratory virus – one that spread more slowly and with a longer, asymptomatic incubation period.
He said that “literally the only place” where quarantine and testing were discussed was Exercise Alice, a much smaller-scale modelling for a non-flu pandemic in 2016, which he was not even briefed about.
The result of such inbuilt assumptions, Hunt told the inquiry, was that by the time a regime of testing and isolation was considered for Covid, the transmission rate was too high. “And then it was inevitable that you were going to have to use a lockdown,” he said. “Had we got on the case much earlier with that approach, we might have avoided that.”
Describing the assumptions of Exercise Cygnus, Hunt said that at one point he was asked to “sanction the emptying of all the intensive care beds in the country … on the grounds that the nursing requirement for those people in intensive care was so big, those nurses could save more lives if they operated in the community.
“Effectively, I was being asked to flick a switch, which would have led to instant deaths and I wasn’t prepared to do that,” he added.
Hunt said: “I think that the truth is, we were very well prepared for pandemic flu, because we’d been giving a lot of thinking to it. But we hadn’t given nearly enough thought to other types of pandemic that might emerge. With the benefit of hindsight, that was a wholly mistaken assumption.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister – who was a Cabinet Office minister with a brief to deal with possible emergencies before Covid – said preparations for a no-deal Brexit meant a pandemic-related group had not met for a year.
The pandemic flu readiness board, run jointly by officials from the Cabinet Office and the health department, did not meet from November 2018 to November or December 2020 amid a “reprioritisation”, as the government focused on Operation Yellowhammer, the contingency plan for the potential impact of a no-deal departure, Dowden said.
“Because of Yellowhammer, and I think that was the right thing to do, we were prioritising resources to make sure that we were equipped for a no-deal scenario,” he said.
Dowden said that the preparations over Yellowhammer obliged departments to work together better and “made us match fit for when we did have to deal with the actual materialisation of that Covid pandemic”.
At the start of the day’s hearing, Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser until 2017, said he had warned David Cameron’s government in 2013 that the UK’s assessment of risks, including from pandemics, was being kept too secret.
Walport raised the concern with Cameron in a letter, and told the inquiry that the national risk assessment (NRA) “was locked in departmental safes most of the time and I felt that that wasn’t the most effective way.
“The whole point of [a] risk assessment is that you will be able to use it, to see if you can stop something happening in the first place,” he said. “If it is going to happen – to mitigate your numbers, reduce its effects.”
The inquiry continues.
