People demonstrate outside the UK COVID-19 Inquiry site in London in October 2023.
Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images
“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic” This is the key conclusion from the first part of a government inquiry looking at the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular its preparedness and resilience.
“In 2019, it was widely believed, both in the UK and abroad, that the UK was not only well prepared to respond to a pandemic, but one of the best prepared countries in the world. This belief was dangerously wrong,” Heather Hallett, a former judge leading the ongoing UK COVID-19 inquiry, said in a video statement released alongside the report. “The reality is that the UK was not prepared.”
“I have no hesitation in saying that the processes, plans and policies of the UK-wide civil emergency response arrangements have let down the people of all four countries,” Mr Hallett said. “There were serious errors on the part of the government and serious failings in the civil emergency system. This cannot be allowed to happen again.”
The main reason the UK was unprepared was because it planned on the assumption that the pandemic would be caused by a dangerous strain of influenza or something similar, the report concluded, “which resulted in risk assessments being narrowly limited, excluding other types of pandemics.”
The next biggest mistake was assuming that, because influenza spreads easily from person to person, there would be no way to stop the spread of a pandemic pathogen. “Plans were focused on dealing with the effects of the disease rather than preventing the spread of the disease,” the report said.
As a result, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no plans to implement measures such as border controls, lockdowns, testing people or contact tracing to identify people who may have the coronavirus and stop them from infecting others.
“There was no preparation whatsoever for the fact that health measures might be needed at the border to protect people,” former health secretary Matt Hancock told the inquiry. Part of the problem is that because responsibility for health measures is devolved to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is not clear who can implement such measures.
The UK government also did not consider the possibility that a lockdown might be necessary. “There was no plan to impose a lockdown,” Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh in the UK said in the study. “The lockdown was an ad-hoc public health intervention devised in real time in the face of a rapidly evolving public health emergency.”
Testing and tracing was envisaged as part of any response to new pathogens, but the capacity to do so was limited because it was assumed that any new infectious diseases would only have a small number of cases.
“One of the first lines of defence against a pandemic is containment, and this requires a test, trace and isolate system that can be rapidly expanded to meet the demands of a large outbreak,” Mr Hallett said. “This did not exist in the UK when the COVID-19 pandemic began.”
“The UK government’s only pandemic plan, developed in 2011, was outdated and inadequate,” she said. “The UK government never applied or adapted it, and the principles on which it was based were ultimately abandoned, along with the 2011 strategy itself.”
The report does not explore the consequences of those failures, but a summary released with the report states that “further preparations could have avoided some of the enormous financial, economic and human costs of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The inquiry will also look at decision-making and political governance in Westminster, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the impact on health systems across the UK, vaccines, medicines, anti-viral treatments, government procurement and PPE, the care sector, testing and tracing, the impact on children and young people, and the government’s operating and financial response.
The latest report quotes civil servant Chris Wormold as saying: “There’s been a lot of discussion, of course, about countries like South Korea, who handled Covid-19 very well. Indeed, they had much higher standards of containment than we were able to, and that was a big difference.”
One of the aims of the review is to help the UK better prepare for the future. “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that another, more infectious and deadly pandemic is likely in the near to medium term,” Hallett said. “This means that the UK will face another pandemic – one that, unless we prepare better, will cause untold suffering and huge economic loss, with the most vulnerable in society suffering the most.”
“This is a most urgent report, as we are still ill-prepared for the next pandemic,” Duncan Robertson of Loughborough University in the UK wrote on X.
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