MPS’ Covid findings will come as no surprise

The House of Commons report (Scotsman, 12 October) on the UK’S horrifically high Covid death rate comes as no surprise. health was undermined by a decade of Tory cuts. Public Health England’s budget was cut by 40 per cent between 2013 and 2019. Public health departments were transferred from the NHS to the local authorities and then had their funding cut as local authority budgets were slashed.

The government failed to prepare for a pandemic. In the run-up to 2020, any emergency planning carried out was focused not on pandemic threats but on the potential consequences of Brexit.

The government refused to learn from other countries. It was slow to adopt measures to contain the virus such as face coverings, border controls and contact tracing to identify infection clusters.

The government squandered £37.5 billion on a centralised test and tracing system that was outsourced to private company Serco that still doesn’t work.

The government focused on the downstream hospital response and ignored the upstream public health response needed to prevent the spread of the virus at the outset.

Inconsistent, mixed messaging undermined public trust. Lifting all protections in midjuly fed the public perception that the pandemic was over when infection levels and hospitalisations were ten times what they were the year before. A failure to financially support infected people so they could self-isolate guaranteed further viral spread.

This is a UK, not Scottish government, failure. Scotland has the lowest infection rate in the UK and second lowest death rate, 30 per cent lower than England.

This was achieved despite Scotland being able to control pandemic measures only at the end of March 2020 and being unable to borrow to save businesses and support those in need.

An independent Scotland would have acted differently, saving thousands of lives. LEAH GUNN BARRETT

Edinburgh