UK Covid-19 inquiry - part one

A collection of climate stories mostly

mirror.co.uk

Perhaps we’ve all heard enough about Covid-19 to last a lifetime?

Jaundiced by the whole affair, my only interest of late was in the battle Baroness Hallett, the Chairperson of the inquiry had, to access Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages.

The government finally lost its high court challenge to prevent Johnson’s messages, notebooks and diaries being read in full. They didn’t want to hand over irrelevant content apparently. Hallett argued it was up to her to decide what was relevant or not.

Shame on them and me for being distracted by this fallacious argument when the real story so far, is the conclusion to the first phase of the inquiry and whether the death of 228,000 British citizens could have been prevented?

69 politicians, civil servants and scientists were asked about the UK’s planning for a pandemic and the readiness of our healthcare system.

How prepared were we as a nation and could we have ever known what was about to happen in March 2020?

I’m grateful to openDemocracy who produced [this video]. They followed proceedings every day of the inquiry and interviewed attendees including the Royal Society for Public Health, the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice and the Trades Union Congress.

The closing statement at the end of this first session by the British Medical Association leaves no room for wiggle.

The UK entered the pandemic with repeated failures in planning and preparedness.

In 2004, a global report warned about coronaviruses specifically, reminding everyone that flu was not the only potential pandemic threat the country might face. But the government chose not to add them to the risk register, a list of the most serious issues facing the UK.

Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary told the inquiry that the UK hadn’t learnt lessons from Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, which had experienced earlier outbreaks of two other coronaviruses - Sars and Mers.

These countries had been quick to introduce contact tracing and quarantine in order to isolate cases when Covid first appeared.

Bizarrely, in 2016, the civil service had gone to the trouble of running a mock-up training day called Alice in preparation for a major outbreak of this nature. Many of the recommendations, including advice to scale up testing capacity and options for isolation were ignored.

Austerity played a major role in this part of the inquiry - how much did it impact the UK and did it make us worse off as a result?

David Cameron and George Osborne, the previous Conservative government’s austerity playmakers prior to Brexit, chose to argue that the country was in much better financial shape than it otherwise would have been. GDP in the UK was increasing, ensuring that the country was more resilient and in a better financial position to spend the money needed to combat the pandemic when it occurred.

This was entirely at odds with nearly every other person in the room, who believed that health services had suffered significantly causing a detrimental impact.

Prior to these wholly disingenuous and purposefully obtuse statements, the inquiry had heard from numerous witnesses across a range of fields of expertise, which concluded unanimously that public health and health services were suffering from a lack of resources, equipment and capacity which impacted their ability to respond when needed.

The country’s health systems were simply not prepared for the pandemic. The NHS already had long waiting lists. Challenges existed around staffing, sharpened by significant budget cuts, which extended to the community sector, where massive reductions had also occurred.

Right now, the NHS still lacks the resilience to respond to another pandemic in terms of staffing levels and number of beds available.

Brexit also had a direct impact on our preparedness.

Department of Health resources were moved and other tasks prioritised to increase planning for a no-deal Brexit. Pandemic planning was either paused or slowed as a result. The paused work included plans to better prepare the adult social care sector for a severe influenza pandemic.

openDemocracy an independent international media platform, has also reported on other discoveries. There was no mention of structural racism in any emergency planning documents. Hospitals had to race to upgrade inadequate oxygen machines and why were the results from pandemic planning programmes kept secret from local councils?

The second and final module of the Covid inquiry begins in October, when the focus will be on the government’s decision making. There are likely to be some fireworks when evidence is finally heard from Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

It’s difficult to stay positive when it’s so easy to see what went wrong. It must be distressing for members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice present at the inquiry to have to listen to politicians’ obfuscating answers, doing their best to distance themselves from blame and responsibility.

As Lobby Akinnola, one member present said,

All this talking in circles just so you can shake your blame, and the end result is my dad is dead.

But answers are what we still desperately need. If this inquiry is about anything it should be about lessons learnt. So next time and there will no doubt be one, the decision making process - the factors and how quickly decisions can be made, will be better understood.