Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has admitted there was an assumption that “we knew best” and could not learn from Asian countries before Covid struck.
The former Health Secretary told the Covid-19 Inquiry that Britain wrongly prepared for flu and mistakenly assumed herd immunity was inevitable during pandemic planning.
Mr Hunt admitted that he was a part of not focusing on the possibility of the need for mass testing, quarantine and widespread use of PPE - unlike Asian countries which had been hit by the Mers virus.
He said: “Looking back it’s very clear… there was an assumption that a mass fatality pandemic would be flu.
“If you look at this assumption that you can’t stop the spread of the virus. I think that was deeply entrenched when Covid arrived.
“We didn’t look at countries like South Korea, and Taiwan, which had a very different assumption about the effectiveness of quarantining.
“There was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way that you contained a virus because it spread like wildfire.”
Mr Hunt was Britain longest serving Health Secretary between 2012 and 2018 when pandemic planning was carried out.
He took part in Exercise Cygnus was a 2016 simulation of a flu outbreak, carried out to war-game the UK’s pandemic readiness, when he said he refused to evacuate all intensive care wards to divert medics to treat patients who were more likely to survive.
Mr Hunt had left office by the start of the pandemic when the Government was criticised for an unwillingness to restrict incoming travellers to the UK and enforce stringent quarantines on those who tested positive with Covid19.
He told the inquiry: “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.
“To understand there are types of pandemic where it is worth putting a massive amount of effort into slowing the spread… one of the very first questions we should have been asking ourselves was, is this one of those pandemics that you can actually [slow the spread] and save lives? I don’t think we had asked those questions.”
People with flu are most contagious in the first three to four days after their illness begins.
By comparison Covid-19 can cause more severe illness in some people.
However people infected with Covid-19 may take longer to show symptoms and may be contagious for longer periods of time.
It more closely resembles Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) - a fellow coronavirus - which struck Asian countries in 2014/15.
Mr Hunt added: “I think they would think that we knew this stuff best.
“There was a sense that we, with perhaps the exception of the US, there wasn’t an enormous amount we could learn from other countries.
“I don’t think people were really registering, particularly [South] Korea as a place that we could learn from… I think it’s very notable that in the first year of the pandemic Korea avoided a lockdown at all.”
He added: “There was clearly a narrowness of thinking of which I was part which didn’t think hard enough about that kind of potential pandemic.”
Mr Hunt was criticised for referring to his part in the Exercise Cygnus war gaming as a “traumatic experience”.
Prof Philip Banfield, council chair at the British Medical Association,
said: “Mr Hunt talks of his ‘traumatic experience’ during a pandemic planning exercise.
“This pales in comparison to the intense trauma of the doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who worked through the real pandemic, and is an insult to those who put their lives on the line daily in the face of a very real and very deadly virus.
“But unlike Mr Hunt, they did not have the luxury to refuse to take part.”
