Covid failures

“We should have tested sooner...” was Humza Yousaf’s response to the biggest UK and Scottish Government failure during the Covid pandemic. Mr Yousaf didn’t tell the Covid Inquiry whether that should have been day one or day ten after patients were transferred from hospitals to care homes, but by then it was too late. If patients couldn’t be tested in hospital they needed to be isolated in secure accommodation and tested there – not integrated with vulnerable residents.

As well as the lack of transparency over Whatsapp messaging, victims who watched relatives die or were savagely deprived of that opportunity and those living with long Covid are understandably scathing about the answers they are getting. Whether it’s Professor Jason Leitch’s nuanced advice on mask wearing and flippant remarks when thousands were dying, the failure to lock down earlier, lack of testing or passing the blame to the

UK Government, victims surely deserve better than this.

To top it all we had Nicola Sturgeon’s then special adviser, Liz Lloyd, gleefully telling the enquiry of trying to wind up the UK Government by looking for a “good old fashioned rammy so I can think about something other than sick people”. They played “political tactics” rather than work together to save the lives of loved ones.

There will be many blaming Nicola Sturgeon next week but it’s becoming clear that thousands died needlessly through the early lack of testing, quarantining and locking down borders across the UK, as some other countries successfully achieved, allowing life to largely carry on as normal.

As Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, stated, the “stay at home” order was “never necessary”, schools should have remained open for longer and there should not have been restrictions outdoors. It was all so unnecessary and unprepared.

Neil Anderson

Edinburgh