... if only a partial one.
Open Democracy reports:
Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has faced the Covid-19 inquiry for the first time, answering questions on why the UK wasn’t adequately prepared for a pandemic that has so far killed more than 200,000 Brits.The mood in the hearing room was sober as Hunt entered and began his evidence giving. He began by discussing a “traumatic” moment in a pandemic simulation where he was asked to make a hypothetical decision that would lead “to the death of numerous people”.
Hunt was grilled about how well the Department of Health – now the Department of Health and Social Care – was prepared for the coronavirus pandemic, particularly after years of austerity measures and an NHS budget that did not rise with inflation or expand to suit an ageing population.
“I don’t think any healthcare systems can plan to have as many doctors or nurses as you would need in an extreme pandemic situation just because of cost,” Hunt said.
Addressing the inquiry, Hunt – now the UK chancellor – explained that a “mistake” was made by focusing preparations on a flu pandemic, rather than a coronavirus pandemic, as well as not putting enough emphasis on prevention.
“We didn’t ask the searching questions as to whether we should be doing more preparations for one of those viruses becoming more contagious,” said Hunt. “We didn’t put anything like the time and effort energy into understanding those dangers [of a coronavirus pandemic].”
He added, however, the need to be “realistic”: “You can’t – as a government – prepare for every single scenario exhaustively, so you have to make choices as to which of those likely scenarios you’re going to have to deal with.”
Hunt was health secretary between 2012 and 2018. During his time in the post, patient experience and staff morale fell, waiting times increased, the waiting list for treatments grew by 1.4 million, and his decisions led to the first ever junior doctor strike.
Speaking about the early days of the pandemic, Hunt said there was “groupthink” that led to certain assumptions about how to manage the virus.
“I think there was a groupthink that we knew this stuff best,” he admitted. “There was a sense that – perhaps with the exception of the United States – there wasn’t an enormous amount to learn from other countries.
“There was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way that you contain a virus that spreads like wildfire.”
The former health secretary also criticised the decision not to show him documents about a pandemic modelling exercise – Exercise Alice* – but did not say whose failure it was.
“Here was the one bit of all our pandemic preparations where we were closest to thinking about a Covid-style pandemic, and it got very little attention in the grander scheme of things,” he said.
Hunt was addressing the first module of the Covid-19 inquiry, hours after deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden was called to give evidence.
Dowden told the inquiry that it was “appropriate” for the UK to have deprioritised pandemic planning in order to focus on a no-deal Brexit.
“We didn’t ask the searching questions as to whether we should be doing more preparations for one of those viruses becoming more contagious,” said Hunt. “We didn’t put anything like the time and effort energy into understanding those dangers [of a coronavirus pandemic].”
He added, however, the need to be “realistic”: “You can’t – as a government – prepare for every single scenario exhaustively, so you have to make choices as to which of those likely scenarios you’re going to have to deal with.”
Hunt was health secretary between 2012 and 2018. During his time in the post, patient experience and staff morale fell, waiting times increased, the waiting list for treatments grew by 1.4 million, and his decisions led to the first ever junior doctor strike.
Speaking about the early days of the pandemic, Hunt said there was “groupthink” that led to certain assumptions about how to manage the virus.
“I think there was a groupthink that we knew this stuff best,” he admitted. “There was a sense that – perhaps with the exception of the United States – there wasn’t an enormous amount to learn from other countries.
“There was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way that you contain a virus that spreads like wildfire.”
The former health secretary also criticised the decision not to show him documents about a pandemic modelling exercise – Exercise Alice* – but did not say whose failure it was.
“Here was the one bit of all our pandemic preparations where we were closest to thinking about a Covid-style pandemic, and it got very little attention in the grander scheme of things,” he said.
Hunt was addressing the first module of the Covid-19 inquiry, hours after deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden was called to give evidence.
Dowden told the inquiry that it was “appropriate” for the UK to have deprioritised pandemic planning in order to focus on a no-deal Brexit.
That last paragraph is really telling. The Johnson government believed it was more important to keep Brexiteers on board than to protect the health of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable citizens.
Apart from that, the ignorance of the Johnsonites is staggering. They really believed that there was more knowledge about SARS-CoV2 in Trump's America than in the nations bordering China. Presumably they dismissed New Zealand, who also imposed entry restrictions in good time, as a bunch of colonials.
All the evidence from other nations who took precautions early is that if the UK, having been given more warning than other European nations, started testing and applying strict border controls from January 2020, a national lockdown and deaths throughout the care system could have been avoided. Elimination of imported virus could not have been 100%, but local flare-ups could have been contained, especially if powers and resources had been restored to local Directors of Public Health.
* The failure to act on exercise Alice is explored in more detail here.
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