The UK Covid Inquiry has published its first report into the Government’s handling of the pandemic.
The 217-page report lays out in detail how a series of failures to prepare for a pandemic led to the UK struggling to deal with Covid when it hit in early 2020.
Here are five key findings:
Covid was not a ‘black swan’ event
Before the Covid pandemic, the thought of a deadly virus sweeping across the world and locking us in our homes felt closer to the plot of a Hollywood film than a real-life event.
Ministers and officials who have given evidence to the sprawling UK Covid Inquiry have frequently characterised the pandemic as a “black swan event”. This is an event so rare and catastrophic that it could not possibly have been predicted.
The Inquiry has rejected this idea completely, arguing that the pandemic was entirely predictable due to the previous outbreak of SARS, a coronavirus, in China in 2003.
“The recent experiences of SARs and MERS meant that another coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale was foreseeable,” Baroness Hallett wrote.
“It was not a black swan event. The absence of such a scenario from the risk assessments was a fundamental error of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.”
Health inequalities worsened the UK’s death toll
The report also focuses on the poor health of the nation prior to 2020 and how this aggravated the spread of the disease and the death toll.
“When the pandemic struck, many of those who suffered and many of those who died were already vulnerable,” it says, adding that the disease “had a disproportionate impact on vulnerable people”.
The pandemic had a disproportionate impact on Britons who were poorer or from an ethnic minority, with a “higher likelihood of sickness and death”.
However, the report argues that the Government only focused on who was “clinically vulnerable” and failed to consider which groups might also be at heightened risk.
“There was too much focus on clinical vulnerability and not enough on wider social and economic factors,” it says.
The Government did not learn lessons from SARS outbreak
The report also focused on a failure by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to draw up plans to respond to a possible outbreak of SARS.
SARS is an airborne virus and can spread through small droplets of saliva in a similar way to the cold and flu. It was the first severe and transmissible disease to emerge in the 21st century.
Despite the Government repeatedly insisting that the DHSC had developed a national contingency plan for SARS, the plans have never been made public.
“No UK-wide contingency plan for SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) or any other high consequence infectious disease has been disclosed by the UK government,” Baroness Hallett wrote.
“The Inquiry is not therefore satisfied that such plans ever existed.”
The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic
Much of Baroness Hallett’s report focuses on the Government’s preoccupation with preparing for a flu pandemic, despite the clear risk posed by the coronavirus.
“It was assumed this would be representative of all pandemics,” it says.
“However, too much weight was placed on this single scenario.”
This planning was “inadequate for a global pandemic” such as Covid, she wrote, and ministers should have planned for different infectious diseases.
The plans for influenza focused on attempting to contain the fallout of the disease, rather than stopping transmission.
No contact tracing system was in place
One of the key failures highlighted in the report is a failure by health officials to establish a contact tracing system.
It highlights how a 2005 report by the Health Protection Agency had noted that contact tracing was among effective measures used to control the SARS outbreak in East Asia.
Officials set up a contract tracing system after the Ebola outbreak in Africa from 2013 to 2016, but this was only at a “small scale”.
As a result, the “entirety of the UK’s testing and contact tracing system was designed to deal with only small numbers of cases of emerging infectious diseases, as opposed to mass testing or contact tracing”.
