Jeremy Hunt spoke about the government's preparations for the pandemic during the Covid investigation. Credit: Lucy North/PA Wire
Major pandemic preparedness exercise The chancellor admitted he couldn't figure out how to stop the virus taking over the country before it led to mass deaths.
Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, also told the Covid Request that the lockdown could have been avoided had the lockdown been introduced earlier during the pandemic.
He acknowledged that the Cygnus exercise, a simulation of the 2016 flu pandemic, was flawed and only considered what the government could do when the pandemic reached over a million cases and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Mr Hunt said, that the government was not «asking the right questions» by focusing on the influenza pandemic, and reported that the results of Operation Alice, another important «armchair exercise» to combat a non-influenza epidemic, had not even been handed over to it.
The Chancellor described Cygnus as a «traumatic experience» and spoke of his shock during a hypothetical exercise when he was asked to vacate all intensive care beds, resulting in numerous deaths. The protocols were changed after he said: «I wasn't ready to do it.»
On the seventh day of the long-awaited investigation, Mr Hunt said there was «almost not enough thought» to prepare Britain for a non-flu pandemic .
“Not asking the right questions.”
He said, “There was another suggestion that we are handling pandemics very well. We all thought so. And so it was, I think, a completely wrong assumption.
“And I think the truth is that we were very well prepared for a flu pandemic because we thought about it a lot. The Swan exercise was a huge event.
“But we didn't think enough about the other types of pandemics that could arise. And that was, in retrospect, a completely wrong assumption.”
Discussing Cygnus, Mr. Hunt explained that the exercise only looked at what could happen when the pandemic «has already taken hold», one million people have been infected and hundreds of thousands have died, rather than stopping the spread of the virus in the first place.< /p>
He said: “We did not ask what we can do to prevent this. I don't think we were asking the right questions.»
After we were shown a summary stating that «generally there is a good level of resilience with good readiness and business continuity arrangements», Mr. Mr. Hunt replied: “We know that the first sentence was wrong. I would like to challenge him then.
“But at no stage were there any questions about how to prevent it from reaching the stage of two to four hundred thousand dead.”
Speaking about the government's response to the pandemic, he said ministers did not learn from countries like South Korea when it came to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).
He said: «If there was one thing that could have slowed down the spread of Covid, when it actually appeared, it was necessary to understand the importance of early quarantine to stop the spread of the disease, and to understand that there are types of pandemics when it is worth making a huge effort to slow the spread.
“One of the very first [questions] we had to ask ourselves was, ‘Is this one of those pandemics that you can really slow down and save lives early on or not?’ And I don't think we asked those questions.
“If we had done this much earlier [the lockdown], we could have avoided it.”
Mr. the impact of the merc virus, was «the only place» where the «importance of quarantine» was clearly stated.
He added: “The fundamental problem was that we — and by the way, not only us in Western Europe and North America — had a general feeling that herd immunity would inevitably be the only way to contain the virus because it was spreading. like wildfire.»
The senior Conservative admitted to being part of 'groupthink' when he was health minister, leading to a 'narrow mindset' that failed to expand the UK's pandemic preparedness beyond outbreak planning flu.
Oliver Dowden was also involved in the Covid investigation on Wednesday. Photo: Lucy North/PA Wire. is in a «pretty strong state of readiness» for any future pandemic, and that the preparations for a no-deal Brexit made the country «suitable» for Covid.
The Inquiry also heard from Professor Sir Mark Walport. , a former chief scientific adviser to the government, who said the UK was «not operationally prepared» for a pandemic.
He added that «our ability to fight infectious diseases has declined over the past 40 to 50 years or more» and suggested that the structure of the National Health Service is not ideal for dealing with a pandemic. .
He said: “This goes back to the fact that the National Health Service is pretty much the national disease control service. This is pressure. He is treating people who are now sick, so there has been a shift away from public health.»
The investigation will resume on Thursday.
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