Lancet’s editor is strong on blame but weak on where governments go from here

THE COVID-19 CATASTROPHE: WHAT’S GONE WRONG

AND HOW TO STOP IT HAPPENING AGAIN

Richard Horton

Polity £12.99

AS the UK comes to terms with one of the worst Covid-19 casualty rates in the world, it is already clear where the main mistakes were made. The country lacked adequate personal protection – gowns and visors – for care staff, nurses and doctors. We abandoned testing prematurely in mid-March. We forgot to protect the most vulnerable, the elderly, when they were decanted from hospitals to care homes.

The UK Government didn’t close the borders and allowed 18 million travellers, many from Italy, to arrive here before lockdown on March 23 without proper health checks or quarantine.

More controversially, the UK and Scottish governments delayed lockdown by a crucial week. This effectively doubled the death rate, from 20,000 to 40,000, according to Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College.

Richard Horton, doctor, editor of The Lancet and honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is in no doubt who is to blame for this “Covid Catastrophe”. “A government’s first responsibility is its duty of care to citizens”, he writes in this new book. “Early government inaction led to the avoidable deaths of thousands of those citizens”. That is possibly the most serious charge you can level at a government. Horton clearly regards Boris Johnson as personally responsible for fatal dither and delay. He quotes him as saying: “Perhaps you could sort of take it on the chin...” and accuses him of pursuing a reckless policy based on herd immunity. Actually, that isn’t quite what the Prime Minister said on ITV’s This Morning on March 5, as as the independent fact checkers, Full Fact, have pointed out.

Johnson said: “One of the theories is perhaps you could take it on the chin”. He went on to make clear this wasn’t the Government’s policy and they intended to take “all the measures that we can to stop the peak of the disease”.

It’s a small point, and doesn’t disprove Horton’s thesis that the Government was “slow, complacent and flat-footed”. But he should have used the full quote.

Throughout the crisis, Mr Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon have insisted they were only “following the science”. The question is: were the Government scientific advisers on SAGE slow and complacent? Horton thinks they were.

“SAGE luxuriated in elite insouciance,” he says. “It displayed a very British characteristic: the arrogance of exceptionalism”. Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, failed in January to study the evidence from the Chinese city of Wuhan; failed to prioritise a testing regime; failed to listen to the World Health Organisation.

However, in Mr Vallance’s defence, in mid-January WHO tweeted that there was “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission of the virus. Mr Horton himself said on January 24 that Covid-19, while a serious health issue, showed “moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity”.

On February 21, the Government’s virus sub-committee, NERVTAG, agreed that the risk from Covid was “moderate”. That was, says Horton, “a genuinely fatal error of judgment”. It also suggests ministers were getting mixed messages.

Recently released minutes from SAGE reveal that as late as March 13 scientists were distinctly cool on the advisability of lockdown. SAGE then were “unanimous” that “measures to completely suppress the spread of Covid-19 will cause a second peak”.

This wasn’t full-fat herd immunity, but it reflected the prevailing view that, as Scotland’s National Clinical Director Jason Leitch put it, the disease couldn’t be stopped and had to “spread through the population” in the absence of a vaccine. All we could do was prevent the NHS being overwhelmed.

The Government’s chief epidemiological modeller, Professor Graham Medley, even told Newsnight on March 13 the old and vulnerable could be sent to Scotland so “we can have a nice big epidemic in Kent.”. He didn’t mean that literally, of course. But Horton sees his remark as evidence that herd immunity was very

much in the back of SAGE’s mind.

IF it was, they were wrong. Covid can be suppressed, at least in the short term. New Zealand rejected WHO advice not to close its borders and slammed them shut as soon as cases of Covid-19 emerged. It then imposed the severest of lockdowns. Last week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern “did a little dance” in celebration of “banishing coronavirus”. Only 22 deaths compared with Scotland’s 2,500 or, including suspected cases, more than 4,000.

This is where I disagree with one of the main themes of Covid Catastrophe, namely that the pandemic has demonstrated the interconnectedness of countries and the folly of “Trumpist” national solutions. New Zealand’s solution was the most radically nationalist imaginable: locking out the rest of the world.

If and when there is a second wave, the first thing governments will do is close their borders. There may be demands in Scotland to close the border with England, or at any rate introduce checks. Covid has been a disaster for globalisation. Nations and borders are back.

Richard Horton avoids direct criticism of China, which is widely believed to have suppressed information about the Wuhan epidemic during December. He admits there is a “gap in the timeline”, but insists he doesn’t want to apportion blame, though he is no slouch when it comes to blaming

Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz, Walker Books, £6.55

What is the book about?

The plot is focused around average 14-year-old Alex Rider who, after his uncle’s mysterious death, is pulled into a whole new world.

After discovering his uncle was not a banker but actually a spy for

MI6, Alex is recruited and trained to take on the mission he was working on before his death. Though it is primarily an action

GEMMA McLAUGHLIN

novel, one of the most prominent themes is grief.

It would have to be how exciting it was. It can be difficult to engage young people in reading, especially around the ages this particular series is aimed it but Alex Rider does this perfectly. The constant excitement and anticipation as to what will happen next allows the reader to become invested in the plot and want to read more of this series and others like it.

Least favourite part?

Some of the plot twists felt a little predictable.

Why buy this book?

Stormbreaker is the first in a series. The 12th instalment came out in early April and a TV series has arrived on Amazon Prime.