UK pandemic planning held back by flawed assumptions, inquiry hears

UK officials believed the country was as well-prepared as anywhere in the world to deal with a pandemic before coronavirus struck, chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the Covid-19 inquiry on Wednesday.

The government failed to draw lessons from Asia and elsewhere, partly as a result, he said.

Hunt, who was health secretary between 2010 and 2018, said a key part of the government’s pandemic planning that took place in 2016, known as Exercise Cygnus, made assumptions that proved later to be too “narrow”.

These included expecting that flu would be the cause of a mass outbreak of disease in the UK rather than another form of contagious virus, and that between 200,000-400,000 deaths were likely at the outset before efforts to halt transmission would be effective.

The three-day government simulation he described tested the UK’s readiness for a mass-fatality influenza outbreak.

“There was another assumption: that we were very good at dealing with pandemics. We all thought it,” Hunt told the inquiry.

He noted that US research university Johns Hopkins had confirmed that view in 2019 by placing Britain second after the US on a global pandemic preparedness table.

In the event, the UK experienced one of the highest per capita death rates from Covid-19 in Europe, with more than 220,00 fatalities to date.

The public inquiry, which is due to hold hearings until at least 2026, was created to examine the country’s response to the pandemic and its impact. In its second week, it has looked back into the decade of austerity preceding the outbreak of coronavirus and probed resilience in public health at the time.

Hunt acknowledged, with hindsight, that the right questions were not being asked at the time. These included whether the threat to the UK could come from a respiratory virus with characteristics like the Mers syndrome but that could spread almost as quickly as flu, and what could be done to halt such a virus before hundreds of thousands of people died.

“I think there was a groupthink that we knew this stuff best. There was a sense with perhaps the exception of the US that there wasn’t an enormous amount we could learn from other countries,” Hunt said.

This meant that the UK had not thought South Korea, where there was an outbreak of Mers in 2015, was a “place to learn from” and did little to prepare for contact tracing, lab testing, quarantining or for stockpiling personal protective equipment, he indicated.

Speaking earlier in the day, Oliver Dowden, deputy prime minister, said he had been assured when he was in charge of resilience at the Cabinet Office between 2018 and 2020 that Britain was in a “strong state” to respond to a pandemic.

He had also been persuaded that planning was on-track despite the pandemic flu readiness board not meeting for a year between 2018 and 2019.

The deputy prime minister said attention at the time was diverted to preparing for the possibility that the UK would crash out of the EU without a Brexit agreement.

“We had to ensure we allocated resources according to where the greatest risk lay,” he told the inquiry, adding that the flipside was that preparations for a no-deal Brexit meant the UK was “match-fit” when Covid eventually struck.