The UK had no plans for preventing or limiting the spread of a covid-19-like infection because it assumed the next pandemic would be caused by an unstoppable flu virus, an inquiry into the outbreak has revealed
By Michael Le Page
18 July 2024
People demonstrating outside the venue for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry in London in October 2023
ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images
“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic.” That is a key conclusion from the first part of a government inquiry examining the UK’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, specifically looking at its preparedness and resilience.
“In 2019, it was widely believed in the United Kingdom and abroad that the UK was not only properly prepared but was one of the best-prepared countries in the world to respond to a pandemic. This belief was dangerously mistaken,” Heather Hallett, the former judge who leads the ongoing UK Covid-19 Inquiry, said in a video statement released alongside the report. “In reality, the UK was ill-prepared.”
“I have no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures across the United Kingdom failed the citizens of all four nations,” said Hallett. “There were serious errors on the part of the state and serious flaws in our civil emergency systems. This cannot be allowed to happen again.”
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A key reason that the UK was ill-prepared was that its planning assumed a pandemic would be due to a dangerous strain of flu or something similar, the report concludes. “The effect was that risk was assessed too narrowly in a way that excluded other types of pandemic.”
Because flu spreads between people so easily, the next key mistake was the assumption that there would be no way to stop a pandemic pathogen from spreading. “Planning was focused on dealing with the impact of the disease rather than preventing its spread,” the report states.