How the UK planned for the wrong pandemic

The nine years from 2011 up to the start of the Covid pandemic are also littered with missed opportunities.

The UK did not learn from east Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. They had used their experience of other coronavirus outbreaks, of Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and Sars (Severe acute respiratory syndrome), to put in place plans to quickly scale-up test and trace systems and introduce quarantine processes. Border control measures, including travel restrictions and testing, could also deployed.

In contrast, the UK abandoned community testing in spring 2020 just as Covid was taking off.

In his evidence for this module, Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, went as far as to say that if we had learned from abroad we could even have avoided the first lockdown.

But it’s not as if there was no attempt to learn lessons.

In the 2010s, a number of training events were held, simulating both flu and coronavirus outbreaks, to stress-test the UK’s preparedness.

One event in 2016 called Exercise Cygnus identified worryingly large gaps in the response and plans were put in place to update those by 2018.

But that did not happen, and by June 2020 just eight of the 22 recommendations made after that exercise had been completed.