Covid: Serious errors and delays cost lives, MPs say

SERIOUS errors and delays, including on testing, care homes and the timing of the first lockdown, have cost lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a damning report from MPs.

The study, from the cross-party Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee, said the UK’s preparation for a pandemic was far too focused on flu and both scientists and ministers waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020. In a wide-ranging report, MPs said:

■ The UK’s pandemic planning was too “narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model” that failed to learn the lessons from Sars, Mers and Ebola. Former chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies told MPs there was “groupthink”, with infectious disease experts not believing that “Sars, or another Sars, would get from Asia to us.”

■ The UK’s national risk register in place at the start of the pandemic said “the likelihood of an emerging infectious disease spreading within the UK is assessed to be lower than that of a pandemic flu”. It also said only up to 100 people may die.

■ The UK policy once Covid emerged was to take a “gradual and incremental approach” to interventions such as social distancing, isolation and lockdowns. MPs said this was “a deliberate policy” proposed by scientists and adopted by UK governments, which has now been shown to be wrong and led to a higher death toll. MPs said the “decisions on lockdowns and social distancing in early weeks of the pandemic – and the advice that led to them – rank as one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced.” ■ While allowing people to become infected early on to reach herd immunity was not an official Government strategy, there was a “policy approach of fatalism about the prospects for Covid in the community”. There was a policy of seeking to only moderate the speed of infection through the population – flattening the curve – rather than seeking to stop its spread. “The policy was pursued until March 23 because of the official scientific advice the Government received, not in spite of it.”

■ Even as late as March 12, 2020, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, told a Government press conference that it was not possible to stop everyone being infected, and nor was that a desirable objective. The next day, members of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) also said they were “unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of Covid19 will cause a second peak.”

■ It was therefore only in the days leading up to the March 23 first lockdown that people within Government and advisers “experienced simultaneous epiphanies that the course the UK was following was wrong, possibly catastrophically so.” A paper from Imperial College London said an unmitigated epidemic could result in 510,000 UK deaths.

■ The UK was too slow to bring in isolation of infected people and their households, compared with other countries such as those in Asia.

■ The UK put in “light-touch border controls” only on countries with high Covid rates, even though 33% of cases during the first wave were introduced from Spain and 29% from France.

Tory MPs Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt, who chair the committees, said: “The UK response has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both to ensure that we perform as best as we possibly can during the remainder of the pandemic and in the future.”