Have We Ever Had a More Pathetic Leader of the Labour Party than Keir
Starmer? He has been the Tories first line of defence
It’s
not often that I repost an article from the Tory Times. In fact it is the first time ever! Clearly the Tory press has decided that given
that Keir Starmer is completely useless, since he believes it is not in the ‘national
interest’ to criticise the Tories bloody failures over COVID-19, they will take
over the role of the Opposition. Presumably 25,000+ deaths (if one includes
care homes) is not enough for Keir.
The
article below is a forensic analysis of Boris Johnson’s failures and they are
many. The only thing wrong with it is the headline. It wasn’t ‘Britain’ that
sleepwalked into disaster but this malevolent incompetent government which
decided that for the sake of the economy, thousands of mainly elderly people
had to die.
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| Johnson joins a lunar new year dragon eyes ritual on the day of a Cobra meeting about the virus in January BEN STANSALL/AFP |
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The
original
plan, in the words of Dominic Cummings, was ‘herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners
die, too bad.” Our playboy Prime Minister was sunning himself in Mustique
when Coronavirus gained momentum.
The government’s
strategy, if you could call it that, was to treat Coronavirus as it would a flu
pandemic and just let it spread.
For
5 weeks the government did nothing. The results are all around us. They
consoled us that stocks of PPE and ventilators were more than adequate when
there were dire shortages. Indeed we had sent them to China at the very time
they were needed!
Plans
for a pandemic had been mothballed. In the words of one adviser “pandemic planning became a casualty of the
austerity years when there were more pressing needs.”
A 2016
exercise Sygnus warned of the collapse of the health services if a pandemic
struck. But it was ignored. Preparations
for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the
blood out of pandemic planning”.
Brexit has
undoubtedly made things worse and led to the refusal to participate in a European
project to source ventilators. Boris’s own personal vanity project was allowed
to trump the needs of NHS front-line workers. The official
excuse was that they ‘lost’ an email, a lie that Brussels rubbished.
The obvious reason was Brexit and pride at not having to rely on the Europeans.
The result is that thousands of people, in particular the elderly, the very
ones who foolishly voted overwhelmingly for him have paid the ultimate price. The
fools who voted for the Tories instead of Corbyn have paid with the lives of
their loved ones.
The failure
to heed the WHO’s advice to ‘test, test, test’ meant that the pandemic was
bound to spread as it was impossible to detect who was carrying the virus.
Johnson’s
fellow buffoon, Donald Trump, has gone one step further and taken the occasion
of a world wide pandemic, in which the United States has been particularly
hard, as the best time to withdraw funding from the World Health Organisation. You
couldn’t make it up. Because they offended
Trump’s vanity, he is going to sentence thousands more, including his own
people, to death.
Having
failed to replenish stocks of PPE, gowns and masks, the government relied
instead on ‘just in time’ contracts with China! Unfortunately these Chinese
factories were dealing with their own pandemic. As the article says, “It was a massive spider’s web of failing,
every domino has fallen,”
Such was the
complacency that in the middle of February Johnson took a 12 day holiday at the
Prime Minister’s country retreat – officially it was a ‘working holiday’.
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| Dominic Cummings - the death of a few thousand old people, the same fools who voted for the Tories, was a price worth paying |
By February
26th the Government was warned that there may be 400,000
deaths. However Boris, who returned a
day earlier had more pressing priorities. The Tory Party Winter Ball. I just hope that the Idiots from the North
and the Elderly are pleased with their decision to heed the warnings from the
BBC and Tory Party not to vote for Corbyn.
We now have
the news that the delivery of 3-4 days of PPE from Turkey has not arrived. The government
has advised medical staff to reuse PPE, going against all safety practice. It really is amazing. It’s Heath Robinson.
What is the
response from Steer Calmer the
pathetic new right-wing leader of the Labour Party? Absolutely nothing. If there is a ‘national
interest’ it is in getting rid of Boris immediately. What Starmer should be doing
is demanding the head of this useless buffoon who goes by the name of Prime
Minister. Instead he does nothing. The sooner the Labour Party gets rid of
Starmer and his collection of right-wing left-overs, Jess Phillips included the
better.
Just as the right-wing
waged an unceasing war against Corbyn we have to wage war against Starmer. He
is the class enemy. What they call a Red
Tory, except that Pink is probably more appropriate.
Tony
Greenstein
Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the
virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings
fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives
Saturday
April 18 2020, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
On the third
Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world.
Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus
was already leaving a trail of bodies.
The virus
had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others.
Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime
mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee.
But it took
just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the
meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.
This was
despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the
medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for
the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic,
which killed up to 50 million people.
Unusually,
Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes
ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of
great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to
the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister.
Johnson had
found time that day, however, to join in a lunar new year dragon eyes ritual as
part of Downing Street’s reception for the Chinese community, led by the
country’s ambassador.
It was a big
day for Johnson and there was a triumphal mood in Downing Street because the
withdrawal treaty from the European Union was being signed in the late
afternoon. It could have been the defining moment of his premiership — but that
was before the world changed.
That
afternoon his spokesman played down the looming threat from the east and
reassured the nation that we were “well prepared for any new diseases”. The
confident, almost nonchalant, attitude displayed that day in January would
continue for more than a month.
Johnson went
on to miss four further Cobra meetings on the virus. As Britain was hit by unprecedented
flooding, he completed the EU withdrawal, reshuffled his
cabinet and then went away to the grace-and-favour country retreat at Chevening
where he spent most of the two weeks over half-term with his pregnant fiancée,
Carrie Symonds.
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| Johnson with Symonds in a selfie posted on social media in February |
It would not
be until March 2 — another five weeks — that Johnson would attend a Cobra
meeting about the coronavirus. But by then it was almost
certainly too late. The virus had sneaked into our airports, our
trains, our workplaces and our homes. Britain was on course for one of the
worst infections of the most deadly virus to have hit the world in more than a
century.
Last week, a
senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of
complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime
minister was singled out.
“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t
there,” the adviser said.
“And what you learn about Boris
was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work
weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local
authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis
planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”
Inquiry ‘inevitable’
One day
there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those
“lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when
politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the
scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health
Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the
most intense scrutiny.
Among the
key points likely to be explored will be why it took so long to recognise an
urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment
(PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and
tests to detect the infection.
An
investigation has talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners,
public officials and politicians about the root of the crisis and whether the
government should have known sooner and acted more swiftly to kick-start the
Whitehall machine and put the NHS onto a war footing.
They told us
that, contrary to the official line, Britain was in a poor state of readiness
for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out
of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The
training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two
years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal
Brexit.
This made it
doubly important that the government hit the ground running in late January and
early February. Scientists said the threat from the coming storm was clear.
Indeed, one of the government’s key advisory committees was given a dire
warning a month earlier than has previously been admitted about the prospect of
having to deal with mass casualties.
It was a
message repeated throughout February but the warnings appear to have fallen on
deaf ears. The need, for example, to boost emergency supplies of protective
masks and gowns for health workers was pressing, but little progress was made
in obtaining the items from the manufacturers, mainly in China.
Instead, the
government sent supplies the other way — shipping 279,000 items of its depleted
stockpile of protective equipment to China during this period, following a
request for help from the authorities there.
Impending danger
The prime
minister had been sunning
himself with his girlfriend in the millionaires’ Caribbean
resort of Mustique when China first alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO)
on December 31 that several cases of an unusual pneumonia had been recorded in
Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province.
In the days
that followed China initially claimed the virus could not be transmitted from
human to human, which should have been reassuring. But this did not ring true
to Britain’s public health academics and epidemiologists who were texting each
other, eager for more information, in early January.
Devi
Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, had
predicted in a talk two years earlier that a virus might jump species from an
animal in China and spread quickly to become a human pandemic. So the news from
Wuhan set her on high alert.
“In early January a lot of my global health
colleagues and I were kind of discussing ‘What’s going on?’” she
recalled.
“China still hadn’t confirmed the
virus was human-to-human. A lot of us were suspecting it was because it was a
respiratory pathogen and you wouldn’t see the numbers of cases that we were
seeing out of China if it was not human-to-human. So that was disturbing.”
By as early
as January 16 the professor was on
Twitter calling for swift action to prepare for the virus. “Been asked by
journalists how serious #WuhanPneumonia outbreak is,” she wrote.
“My answer: take it seriously
because of cross-border spread (planes means bugs travel far & fast),
likely human-to-human transmission and previous outbreaks have taught
overresponding is better than delaying action.”
Events were
now moving fast. Four hundred miles away in London, from its campus next to the
Royal Albert Hall, a team at Imperial College’s School of Public Health led by
Professor Neil Ferguson produced its first modelling assessment of the likely
impact of the virus. On Friday, January 17, its report noted the “worrying”
news that three cases of the virus had been discovered outside China — two in Thailand
and one in Japan. While acknowledging many unknowns, researchers calculated
that there could already be as many as 4,000 cases. The report warned:
“The magnitude of these numbers
suggests substantial human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. Heightened
surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are
recommended.”
By now the
mystery bug had been identified as a type of coronavirus — a large family of
viruses that can cause infections ranging from the common cold to severe acute
respiratory syndrome (Sars). There had been two reported deaths from the virus
and 41 patients had been taken ill.
The
following Wednesday, January 22, the government convened its first meeting of
its scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus. Its
membership is secret but it is usually chaired by the government’s chief
scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and chief medical adviser, Professor
Chris Whitty. Downing Street advisers are also present.
There were
new findings that day with Chinese scientists warning that the virus had an
unusually high infectivity rate of up to 3.0, which meant each person with the
virus would typically infect up to three more people.
One of those
present was Imperial’s Ferguson, who was already working on his own estimate —
putting infectivity at 2.6 and possibly as high as 3.5 — which he sent to
ministers and officials in a report on the day of the Cobra meeting on January
24. The Spanish flu had an estimated infectivity rate of between 2.0 and 3.0,
so Ferguson’s finding was shocking.
The
professor’s other bombshell in the same report was that there needed to be a
60% cut in the transmission rate — which meant stopping contact between people.
In layman’s terms it meant a lockdown, a move that would paralyse an economy
already facing a battering from Brexit. At the time such a suggestion was
unthinkable in the government and belonged to the world of post-apocalypse
movies.
The growing
alarm among scientists appears not to have been heard or heeded by
policy-makers. After the January 25 Cobra meeting, the chorus of reassurance
was not just from Hancock and the prime minister’s spokesman: Whitty was
confident too.
In early February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the virus STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
“Cobra met today to discuss the situation in Wuhan,
China,” said Whitty.
“We have global experts
monitoring the situation around the clock and have a strong track record of
managing new forms of infectious disease . . . there are no confirmed cases in
the UK to date.”
However, by
then there had been 1,000 cases worldwide and 41 deaths, mostly in Wuhan. A
Lancet report that day presented a study of 41 coronavirus patients admitted to
hospital in Wuhan which found that more than half had severe breathing
problems, a third required intensive care and six had died.
And there
was now little doubt that the UK would be hit by the virus. A study by
Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from
Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The
researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been
infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a
centre of the subsequent pandemic.
Sure enough,
five days later on Wednesday, January 29, the first coronavirus cases on
British soil were found when two Chinese nationals from the same family fell
ill at a hotel in York. The next day, the government raised the threat level
from low to moderate.
The pandemic plan
On January
31 — or Brexit day as it had become known — there was a rousing 11pm speech by
the prime minister promising that the withdrawal from the European Union would
be the dawn of a new era unleashing the British people who would “grow in confidence” month by month.
By this
time, there was good reason for the government’s top scientific advisers to
feel creeping unease about the virus. The WHO had declared the coronavirus a
global emergency just the day before and scientists at the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had confirmed to Whitty in a private meeting of
the Nervtag advisory committee on respiratory illness that the virus’s
infectivity could be as bad as Ferguson’s worst estimate several days earlier.
The official
scientific advisers were willing to concede in public that there might be
several cases of the coronavirus in the UK. But they had faith that the
country’s plans for a pandemic would prove robust.
This was
probably a big mistake. An adviser to Downing Street — speaking off the record
— says their confidence in “the plan” was misplaced. While a possible pandemic
had been listed as the No 1 threat to the nation for many years, the source
says that in reality it had long since stopped being treated as such.
Several
emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a
pandemic had once been a top priority and had been well-funded for a decade
following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But then austerity cuts struck.
“We were the envy of the world,” the
source said, “but pandemic planning
became a casualty of the austerity years when there were more pressing needs.”
The last
rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted
the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings —
including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.
But an
equally lengthy list of recommendations to address the deficiencies was never
implemented. The source said preparations for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the
blood out of pandemic planning” in the following years.
In the year
leading up to the coronavirus outbreak key government committee meetings on
pandemic planning were repeatedly “bumped” off the diary to make way for
discussions about more pressing issues such as the beds crisis in the NHS.
Training for NHS staff with protective equipment and respirators was also
neglected, the source alleges.
Members of
the government advisory group on pandemics are said to have felt powerless.
“They would
joke between themselves, ‘Haha let’s hope we don’t get a pandemic,’ because
there wasn’t a single area of practice that was being nurtured in order for us
to meet basic requirements for pandemic, never mind do it well,”
said the
source.
“If you were
with senior NHS managers at all during the last two years, you were aware that
their biggest fear, their sweatiest nightmare, was a pandemic because they
weren’t prepared for it.”
It meant
that the government had much catching up to do when it was becoming clear that
this “nightmare” was becoming a distinct possibility in February. But the
source says there was little urgency.
“Almost
every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government
department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,”
the source said.
One
deviation from the plan, for example, was a failure to give an early warning to
firms that there might be a lockdown so they could start contingency planning.
“There was a duty to get them to start
thinking about their cashflow and their business continuity arrangements,” the
source said.
Superspreader
A central
part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously
pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine. That involves
testing and the UK initially seemed to be ahead of the game. In early February
Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to
develop a new test for the coronavirus. “Testing
worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford,” he said.
So when
Steve Walsh, a 53-year-old businessman from Hove, East Sussex, was identified
as the source of the second UK outbreak on February 6 all his contacts were
followed up with tests. Walsh’s case was a warning of the rampant infectivity
of the virus as he is believed to have passed it to five people in the UK after
returning from a conference in Singapore as well as six overseas.
But Public
Health England failed to take advantage of our early breakthroughs with tests
and lost early opportunities to step up production to the levels that would
later be needed.
This was in
part because the government was planning for the virus using its blueprint for
fighting the flu. Once a flu pandemic has found its way into the population and
there is no vaccine, then the virus is allowed to take its course until “herd
immunity” is acquired. Such a plan does not require mass testing.
A senior
politician told this newspaper: “I had
conversations with Chris Whitty at the end of January and they were absolutely
focused on herd immunity.’ The reason is that with flu, herd immunity is
the right response if you haven’t got a vaccine.
“All of our
planning was for pandemic flu. There has basically been a divide between
scientists in Asia who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of
Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in
the US and UK, who saw this as flu.”
The prime
minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings is said to have had initial
enthusiasm for the herd immunity concept, which may have played a part in the
government’s early approach to managing the virus. The Department of Health
firmly denies that “herd immunity” was ever its aim and rejects suggestions
that Whitty supported it. Cummings also denies backing the concept.
The failure
to obtain large amounts of testing equipment was another big error of judgment,
according to the Downing Street source. It would later be one of the big
scandals of the coronavirus crisis that the considerable capacity of Britain’s
private laboratories to mass-produce tests was not harnessed during those
crucial weeks of February.
“We should
have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer
to become part of the government’s testing regime but that didn’t happen,”
said the
source.
The lack of
action was confirmed by Doris-Ann Williams, chief executive of the British In
Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most
of the UK’s testing sector. Amazingly, she says her organisation did not
receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1
— the night before Hancock bowed to pressure and announced a belated and
ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month.
There was
also a failure to replenish supplies of gowns and masks for health and care
workers in the early weeks of February — despite NHS England declaring the
virus its first “level four critical incident” at the end of January.
It was a key
part of the pandemic plan — the NHS’s Operating Framework for Managing the
Response to Pandemic Influenza dated December 2017 — that the NHS would be able
to draw on “just in case” stockpiles of PPE.
But many of
the “just in case” stockpiles had dwindled, and equipment was out of date. As
not enough money was being spent on replenishing stockpiles, this shortfall was
supposed to be filled by activating “just in time” contracts which had been
arranged with equipment suppliers in recent years to deal with an emergency. The
first order for equipment under the “just in time” protocol was made on January
30.
However, the
source said that attempts to call in these “just in time” contracts immediately
ran into difficulties in February because they were mostly with Chinese manufacturers
who were facing unprecedented demand from the country’s own health service and
elsewhere.
This was
another nail in the coffin for the pandemic plan. “It was a massive spider’s web of failing, every domino has fallen,”
said the source.
The NHS could
have contacted UK-based suppliers. The British Healthcare Trades Association
(BHTA) was ready to help supply PPE in February — and throughout March — but it
was only on April 1 that its offer of help was accepted. Dr Simon Festing, the
organisation’s chief executive, said: “Orders
undoubtedly went overseas instead of to the NHS because of the missed
opportunities in the procurement process.”
Downing
Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack
of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government
had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000
sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China.
A senior
department of health insider described the sense of drift witnessed during
those crucial weeks in February:
“We missed
the boat on testing and PPE . . . I remember being called into some of the
meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well it’s a good thing this
isn’t the big one.’
“I had
watched Wuhan but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did
nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk
register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been
Germany but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our
austerity.”
In the Far
East the threat was being treated more seriously in the early weeks of
February. Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was in a unique position to
compare the UK’s response with Singapore, where he had advised in the past.
“Singapore
realised, as soon as Wuhan reported it, that cases were going to turn up in
Singapore. And so they prepared for that. I looked at the UK and I can see a
different strategy and approach.
“The
interesting thing for me is, I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and
basically they copied the UK pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is
they actually implemented it.”
Working holiday
Towards the
end of the second week of February, the prime minister was demob happy. After
sacking five cabinet ministers and saying everyone “should be confident and calm” about Britain’s response to the
virus, Johnson vacated Downing Street after the half-term recess began on
February 13.
He headed to
the country for a “working” holiday at Chevening with Symonds and would be out
of the public eye for 12 days. His aides were thankful for the rest, as they
had been working flat out since the summer as the Brexit power struggle had
played out.
The Sunday
newspapers that weekend would not have made comfortable reading. The Sunday
Times reported on a briefing from a risk specialist which said that Public
Health England would be overrun during a pandemic as it could test only 1,000
people a day.
Johnson may
well have been distracted by matters in his personal life during his stay in
the countryside. Aides were told to keep their briefing papers short and cut
the number of memos in his red box if they wanted them to be read.
His family
needed to be prepared for the announcement that Symonds, who turned 32 in
March, was pregnant and that they had been secretly engaged for some time.
Relations with his children had been fraught since his separation from his
estranged wife Marina Wheeler and the rift deepened when she had been diagnosed
with cancer last year.
The divorce
also had to be finalised. Midway through the break it was announced in the High
Court that the couple had reached a settlement, leaving Wheeler free to apply
for divorce.
There were
murmurings of frustration from some ministers and their aides at the time that
Johnson was not taking more of a lead. But Johnson’s aides are understood to
have felt relaxed: he was getting updates and they claim the scientists were
saying everything was under control.
400,000 deaths
By the time
Johnson departed for the countryside, however, there was mounting unease among
scientists about the exceptional nature of the threat. Sir Jeremy Farrar, an
infectious disease specialist who is a key government adviser, made this clear
in a recent BBC interview.
“I think
from the early days in February, if not in late January, it was obvious this
infection was going to be very serious and it was going to affect more than
just the region of Asia ,”
he said.
“I think it
was very clear that this was going to be an unprecedented event.”
By February
21, the virus had already infected 76,000 people, had caused 2,300 deaths in
China and was taking a foothold in Europe with Italy recording 51 cases and two
deaths the following day. Nonetheless Nervtag, one of the key government
advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.
Its members
may well regret that decision with hindsight and it was certainly not
unanimous. John Edmunds, one of the country’s top infectious disease modellers
from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was participating in
the meeting by video link but his technology failed him at the crucial moment.
Edmunds
wanted the threat level to be increased to high but could not make his view
known as the link was glitchy. He sent an email later making his view clear.
“JE believes
that the risk to the UK population [in the PHE risk assessment] should be high,
as there is evidence of ongoing transmission in Korea, Japan and Singapore, as
well as in China,”
the
meeting’s minutes state. But the decision had already been taken.
Peter
Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College, was in
America at the time of the meeting but would also have recommended increasing
the threat to high. Three days earlier he had given an address to a seminar in
which he estimated that 60% of the world’s population would probably become
infected if no action was taken and 400,000 people would die in the UK.
By February
26, there were 13 known cases in the UK. That day — almost four weeks before a
full lockdown would be announced — ministers were warned through another
advisory committee that the country was facing a catastrophic loss of life
unless drastic action was taken. Having been thwarted from sounding the alarm,
Edmunds and his team presented their latest “worst scenario” predictions to the
scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M) which directly advises
the country’s scientific decision-makers on Sage.
It warned
that 27 million people could be infected and 220,000 intensive care beds would
be needed if no action were taken to reduce infection rates. The predicted
death toll was 380,000. Edmunds’s colleague Nick Davies, who led the research,
says the report emphasised the urgent need for a lockdown almost four weeks
before it was imposed.
The team
modelled the effects of a 12-week lockdown involving school and work closures,
shielding the elderly, social distancing and self-isolation. It estimated this
would delay the impact of the pandemic but there still might be 280,000 deaths
over the year.
Johnson returns
The previous
night Johnson had returned to London for the Conservatives’ big fundraising
ball, the Winter Party, at which one donor pledged £60,000 for
the privilege of playing a game of tennis with him.
By this time
the prime minister had missed five Cobra meetings on the preparations to combat
the looming pandemic, which he left to be chaired by Hancock. Johnson was an
easy target for the opposition when he returned to the Commons the following
day with the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, labelling him a “part-time” prime
minister for his failure to lead on the virus crisis or visit the areas of the
UK badly hit by floods.
By Friday,
February 28, the virus had taken root in the UK with reported cases rising to
19 and the stock markets were plunging. It was finally time for Johnson to act.
He summoned a TV reporter into Downing Street to say he was on top of the
coronavirus crisis.
“The issue of coronavirus is something that
is now the government’s top priority,” he said.
“I have just
had a meeting with the chief medical officer and secretary of state for health
talking about the preparations that we need to make.”
It was
finally announced that he would be attending a meeting of Cobra — after a
weekend at Chequers with Symonds where the couple would publicly release news
of the engagement and their baby.
On the
Sunday, there was a meeting between Sage committee members and officials from
the Department of Health and NHS which was a game changer, according to a Whitehall
source. The meeting was shown fresh modelling based on figures from Italy
suggesting that 8% of infected people might need hospital treatment in a
worst-case scenario. The previous estimate had been 4%-5%.
“The risk to
the NHS had effectively doubled in an instant. It set alarm bells ringing
across government,” said the Whitehall source. “I think that meeting focused
minds. You realise it’s time to pull the trigger on the starting gun.”
 |
| Many NHS workers have been left without proper protection |
At the Cobra
meeting the next day with Johnson in the chair a full “battle plan” was finally
signed off to contain, delay and mitigate the spread of the virus. This was on
March 2 — five weeks after the first Cobra meeting on the virus.
The new push
would have some positive benefits such as the creation of new Nightingale
hospitals, which greatly increased the number of intensive care beds. But there
was a further delay that month of nine days in introducing the lockdown as
Johnson and his senior advisers debated what measures were required. Later the
government would be left rudderless again after Johnson himself contracted the
virus.
As the
number of infections grew daily, some things were impossible to retrieve. There
was a worldwide shortage of PPE and the prime minister would have to personally
ring manufacturers of ventilators and testing kits in a desperate effort to
boost supplies.
The result
was that the NHS and care home workers would be left without proper protection
and insufficient numbers of tests to find out whether they had been infected.
To date 50 doctors, nurses and NHS workers have died. More than 100,000 people
have been confirmed as infected in Britain and 15,000 have died.
This
weekend, sources close to Hancock said that from late January he instituted a
“prepare for the worst” approach to the virus, held daily meetings and started
work on PPE supplies.
A Downing
Street spokesman said:
“Our
response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to
ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing
protection to businesses and reassurance to workers. The prime minister has
been at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this
hugely challenging period for the whole nation.”
