The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Planning exercise ‘insufficient’ for scale of Covid-19, MSPs told
A pandemic planning exercise held in 2015 was insufficient to prepare for the “infectiousness” of Covid-19, Scotland’s health secretary has said.
Jeane Freeman also said the UK Government’s overseas networks were told not to help devolved administrations with procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) during the current outbreak.
Ms Freeman gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s health committee about PPE yesterday.
She was asked about Exercise Silver Swan in 2015, where Scottish public services dealt with a simulated flu outbreak.
The UK Government ran a similar exercise called Cygnus, though the results of neither have been published in full.
The health secretary said: “In Scotland we had Silver Swan, which was in 2015, and predated Cygnus, but like Cygnus it focused on a pandemic flu situation.
“The principal conclusion from that for the NHS in Scotland was the need to create the pandemic stockpile, which we did.
“There was also a UK pandemic stockpile created for use across the four nations of the UK, so that stockpile was created to hold in case there was a pandemic.”
She said Silver Swan was useful in preparing for the current pandemic, but Covid-19 behaves differently than flu.
Ms Freeman continued: “It was of value to us when we began to deal with this particular coronavirus pandemic.
“But in some respects was not sufficient, particularly around the emerging clinical and scientific understanding of how coronavirus spreads and its level of infectiousness, if you like.
“And so we had to scale up our stockpiling and our ordering of particular items of PPE.”
She said she could share the recommendations of the report with the health committee.
However, she added that scientific understanding of Covid-19 is continuing to grow, including its long-term health effects on people who have recovered from the virus.
Ms Freeman also said she raised an issue with UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock regarding procurement of PPE from the UK’s overseas networks.
She told the committee: “Advice was issued not to support new procurement asks from devolved administrations.”