FLU THREAT ASIA HAD PLANS

Dame Sally’s advisers may well argue that it made sense at the time to focus on influenza. Since the Spanish flu pandemic killed more than 50 million worldwide in 1918, nearly every significant outbreak apart from HIV/AIDS has been some form of flu, including Asian flu in 1957, Hong Kong flu in 1967, and swine flu in 2009. A flu pandemic has been rated as the most serious threat to UK security on the National Risk Register since 2008, above terror attacks and natural disasters. But while the Government was failing to take the coronavirus threat seriously, careful plans were being made thousands of miles away. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam had been struck by the Sars coronavirus in late 2002 and early 2003. The South Korean government, meanwhile, had been criticised for its sluggish response to an outbreak of Mers, another coronavirus, in 2015. Both coronaviruses could be stopped by testing and quarantining infected people and then tracking down their contacts, so those countries designed ways to halt the spread through “nonpharmaceutical interventions”. South Korea laid out plans to “aggressively track down contacts and isolate them at home”, and prepared a network of testing labs. In Taiwan, officials developed a stay-at-home plan and told families to keep a store of face masks. When Covid arrived, South East Asia was ready, while the UK and many other Western nations were not.