Matt Hancock said that Government ministers responded to a terrifying warning about the impact of Covid with a "shrug shrug" two months before the UK was placed into its first lockdown.
The MP, who was the UK Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021, said that he was informed by England's chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty in January 2020 that up to 820,000 people could be killed from the virus in the UK in a "reasonable worst-case scenario". But Hancock said that he was met with indifference when he passed the dire warning on to fellow ministers at a Cabinet meeting on 31 January.
“The reaction was somewhat ‘shrug shrug’ – essentially because they didn’t really believe it. I am constantly feeling that others, who aren’t focused on this every day, are weeks behind what’s going on,” he said.
READ MORE: Warning as Strep A cases being investigated by health experts after deaths of six young children
The details were revealed in Hancock's Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story Of Britain’s Battle Against Covid, serialised in the Daily Mail. The diaries were released as the MP returned to Parliament for the first time since his contentious stint on ITV's I'm A Celebrity.
Hancock also spoke of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson 's initial reaction to news of the virus. According to the former Health Secretary, when first told about the outbreak in China back in January 2020 Johnson responded: “You keep an eye on it. It will probably go away.”
In his diaries, the MP also defended one of the most controversial aspects of the pandemic which was blamed for thousands of deaths - the decision to release care home residents from hospital without testing. Hancock said that Sir Simon Stevens, the then-chief executive of NHS England, had pushed for elderly patients who did not need urgent treatment to be discharged from hospital.
Hancock wrote on 2 April: “The tragic but honest truth is we don’t have enough testing capacity to check anyway. It’s an utter nightmare, but it’s the reality.”
The MP famously resigned from his role as Health Secretary in June last year after he was caught on camera breaching social distancing guidelines by having an affair with colleague Gina Coladangelo. His decision to take part in I'm A Celebrity sparked a huge backlash from bereaved families whose lives were changed forever by the pandemic, as well as leading to him having the Tory whip suspended.
There have been just over 212,000 Covid deaths in the UK since the pandemic began, meaning that Britain has one of the highest death tolls for the virus in Europe. There have been 24 million confirmed cases of Covid in the country since records began in January 2020.
READ NEXT:
-
Warning over vaccine fatigue as flu season will be 'worse than usual'
-
Pain during sex and swollen stomach can be red flags of deadly cancer
-
A&E attendance at Royal Victoria Infirmary up almost 20% compared to before Covid-19
-
'No more delays' - Contaminated blood scandal victim urges Government to publish its report
