Inside Health
UK’S Covid failures mean Scotland is right to go own way, says Sir Harry Burns
Back in the 1980s, I was a surgeon in Glasgow’s Western Infirmary. The staff in Sir Andrew Kay’s unit were friendly, hard-working and pretty smart. After work on Friday, we would usually retire to the Aragon in Byres Road and debate the issues of the day. David Hamilton, our transplant surgeon, was for Scottish independence. Often, his solution to political silliness from Westminster was: “It’s time to shut the border.” Sam Galbraith, on the other hand, was fervently against the idea. Being politically disinterested, I found their arguments entertaining but pretty pointless. My experience of Covid-19 is, however, getting me rather agitated about politics. We are in the middle the most significant public health crisis in living memory and the UK is being led by incompetents.
Early on, it was clear this virus was highly infectious and had a significant mortality in older people and those with underlying illness. The countries that adopted a public health approach have managed to suppress spread far more effectively than the UK. From the beginning, the World Health Organisation was telling countries to “test, trace and isolate”. Separating infected people from the uninfected is a critical part of suppressing any outbreak. In mid-march, the UK Government abandoned attempts to suppress transmission in favour of a “delay” phase. This was described as an effort to “flatten the curve” by encouraging herd immunity – let lots of people get infected and hope the survivors become immune. Boris Johnson admitted that “many more families are going to lose loved ones”.
That weekend, thousands of people attended Cheltenham Festival. A football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid, involving many supporters travelling from Spain was allowed to go ahead. Was that wise, he was asked? “It is very important that we’re guided by the science,” Boris claimed. “There is very little epidemiological or medical reason at the moment to ban such events.” His Chief Scientist, Patrick Vallance, unsurprisingly supported him, claiming cancelling large events was “not a major way to tackle this epidemic”. A week later, lockdown had to be implemented when the modelling by Imperial College showed hundreds of thousands of people would die without it.
By then, it was too late. The virus was spreading and the Government had not implemented the steps necessary to identify and isolate those infected and liable to spread the virus. The promise of testing 100,000 people a day has not, despite Matt Hancock’s claim, been delivered. The tracing system, we are told by Hancock, is ready to go with 25,000 contact tracers having been recruited across England. “They have rigorous training with detailed procedures designed by our experts at Public Health England.” Some of these people are claiming their training involved three days being paid but little information or training. Some of their training involved Youtube videos.
I now find myself wanting to throw things at the TV when I watch UK Government ministers trying to defend the indefensible. I suspect the same frustration is felt by those trying to protect Scotland from Covid. The Scottish Government is absolutely correct to break ranks from England on lockdown policy. It is difficult for a devolved administration to move too distantly from Westminster but the First Minister is right to outline a distinct path. I’m coming to the conclusion that my friend David Hamilton was correct. If we had shut the border years ago, we would have been able to protect ourselves from UK Government incompetence.