www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh
[I am quoting some of the highlights because many here won't have a
subscription to get through the paywall]
Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster
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
Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. 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.
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.”
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severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in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.
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.
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.
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.
[There is much more in the article]