Pandemic lockdowns damaged an entire generation of young people, a former health chief has said in an emotional hearing at the Covid Inquiry.
Professor Dame Sally Davies, the former Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England was close to tears as she said “sorry” to the relatives who lost loved ones during the Covid outbreak.
“I mean it’s clear that no one thought about lockdown,” she told the inquiry.
“I still think we should have locked down the first time or a week earlier. But during that, we should have thought further. The damage I now see to children and students from Covid and the educational impact tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do.
“We have damaged a generation and it is awful, as head of a college in Cambridge, watching these young people struggle, and I know, in pre-school, they haven’t learned how to socialise and play properly, they haven’t learned how to read at school, we must have plans for those.”
The inquiry was told that Dame Sally, who was England’s CMO between 2010 and 2019, had total independence of thought and ability to advise.
Now Master at Trinity College Cambridge, she explained that, in her role as CMO, she tried to help policy teams know what the latest stance was.
Dame Sally also spoke about Exercise Cygnus – a cross-government exercise to test the UK’s response to a serious influenza pandemic that took place over three days in October 2016 and involved more than 950 people.
She explained that the conclusion from the exercise was that the UK’s plans and response were not sufficient to cope with severe demands of a pandemic.
However, she also said that she believed the UK’s plans for a flu pandemic could “pivot effectively” to combat other pathogens.
Dame Sally told the inquiry: “I believe that if we prepared well for flu, we should be able to pivot pretty effectively. And we can’t prepare for everything. Meanwhile, we did a lot of learning as we went.”
Asked whether there was a “bias” towards preparing for a flu pandemic, she said there was a “groupthink” about influenza, adding: “It wasn’t just us, this was the whole global north, the western world thought that flu was the thing to focus on.”
She said that there had been four flu pandemics in the past century, adding: “We will have more, it’s only a question of when.”
She continued: “So for me the issue is not should we not prepare for flu, we must prepare for flu.
“The question is what else we do over and above that?”
“Clearly we could have done more thinking.”
Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies told the Covid inquiry that the way in which people died during the pandemic "was harrowing and it remains horrible."https://t.co/FjdkpMz6ru pic.twitter.com/SaSlj4xF5D
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 20, 2023
Dame Sally also told the inquiry she instigated Alice, an exercise modelling the impact of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which is caused by a coronavirus outbreak, four years before the Covid-19 pandemic.
When asked whether the recommendations from the exercise were put into place, she responded: “I would have expected them to be, but it appears they weren’t.”
During her questioning, she said: “Maybe this is the moment to say how sorry I am to the relatives who lost their families.
“It wasn’t just the deaths, it was the way they died. It was horrible.”
She told lead counsel Hugo Keith KC: “I heard a lot about it from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland.
“It was harrowing and it remains horrible.”
It comes after former prime minister David Cameron told the inquiry on Monday that it was a “mistake” for his Government to focus too heavily on preparing for a flu pandemic.
His chancellor George Osborne rejected claims his austerity programme depleted the NHS as he suggested his cuts better prepared Britain to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
He told the inquiry: “If we had not had a clear plan to put the public finances on a sustainable path then Britain might have experienced a fiscal crisis, we would not have had the fiscal space to deal with the coronavirus pandemic when it hit”.
