The consequence, as Lady Hallett's first report from the Covid inquiry notes, is that the UK government failed in its basic responsibility to its citizens of keeping them safe. The UK had too many preventable deaths, not only from Covid, but also from the shutdown of health services and a long lockdown that would have been unnecessary had public health systems been in place.
It points to the lack of a containment strategy: why was so little planning or thought given to public health infrastructure namely test, trace, isolate prior to 2020? Why did officials initially think that the virus was unstoppable when other countries were showing that containment was possible in 2020 (and had shown it was possible with two other coronaviruses, Sars and Mers, in the years before)?
Hallett pointed specifically to the health secretaries Jeremy Hunt, then Matt Hancock who not only maintained the flawed plan in the years before the Covid pandemic, but also left things in such a state that the wider government was not prepared to coordinate a wider response to what she called whole-system civil emergencies.
#sars #pandemic-preparedness #uk-government-response #covid-19-pandemic #public-health-infrastructure
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