Former medical tsar Dame Sally Davies admits Britain was ill-prepared for Covid-19
Former medical tsar Dame Sally Davies admits Britain was ill-prepared for Covid-19 and officials were caught by surprise
- Dame Sally Davies said country was ill-prepared for the coronavirus outbreak
- She claims government officials told her a virus from Asia wouldn’t travel this far
- Public Health England officials assured her the disease would never reach the UK in large numbers, she claimed
File photo from 2018 showing Chief medical officer for England Dame Sally Davies
The UK’s former chief medical officer says the country was ill-prepared for Covid-19, and government officials told her a coronavirus from Asia would ‘never travel this far’.
Dame Sally Davies said she asked health experts whether the country should rehearse for an outbreak of a coronavirus in 2015, when she still held the ‘nanny-in-chief’ position.
The Public Health England (PHE) officials assured her a coronavirus would never reach the UK in large numbers, she claimed.
Coronaviruses include SARS, which caused an epidemic in the early 2000s after emerging in China, and MERS, a deadly disease first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012.
But PHE said the claims were not true, adding: ‘Dame Sally Davies participated in exercises which planned specifically for a MERS coronavirus scenario in the UK amongst other health threats.’
Dame Sally, 70, is expected to accuse PHE of misleading the Government into practising for the ‘wrong pandemic’ at a public inquiry into Covid-19.
In her first interview since handing over the job to Professor Chris Whitty in September last year, she added: ‘Compared to other countries, we’ve been found wanting’
She told The Daily Telegraph: ‘We didn’t practise how to stop a coronavirus spreading because we were told by Public Health England that the next big one would be influenza, and they didn’t believe it could be stopped.
‘One day we will certainly get another flu pandemic, so we prepared for that, and I think we prepared well.
‘But none of the experts seemed to think a coronavirus would be relevant.’
Dame Sally, nicknamed ‘nanny-in-chief’ for her bold public health interventions, was succeeded by Professor Chris Whitty in October.
In her first interview since handing over the job to Professor Whitty, who has become a face for guiding Britain through the coronavirus crisis, Dame Sally said: ‘Compared to other countries, we’ve been found wanting.
‘We were not as well prepared as we should have been. I think the public deserves to know everything.’
Dame Sally told the paper the country was ‘not as well prepared as we should have been’, claiming health chiefs had not recognised coronaviruses as a threat.
As a result, there were no plans in place to scale up mass testing or build a robust contact tracing system – unlike other countries who managed to keep Covid-19 largely under control.
PHE focused on the risk of a flu outbreak, practisting a simulation codenamed ‘Exercise Cygnus’ in 2016 in which officials responded to a dummy pandemic in real time.
The scenario was set seven weeks into a pandemic, when hospitals were already overwhelmed, meaning ministers did not practise what to do to stop a highly contagious disease spreading in the outset.
The existence of Exercise Cygnus only became apparent earlier this year after being kept secret for years.
A leaked report identified a ‘lack of joint tactical-level plans’ for a public health emergency, with demand for services outstripping local capacity. It also discussed concerns about the care home and social sector if an outbreak occurred.
Dame Sally said: ‘I did ask during a conversation in my office in around 2015, should we do Sars? But I was told no, because it wouldn’t reach us properly. They said it would die out and would never travel this far.
‘So I did ask, but it was the Public Health England people who said we didn’t need to do it, and I’ll say that to Parliament.
‘That advice meant we never seriously sat down and said: “Will we have a massive pandemic of something else?”‘
A PHE spokesman said: ‘The claim that PHE ignored threats other than flu is wrong.
‘Dame Sally Davies participated in exercises which planned specifically for a coronavirus scenario in the UK, among other health threats.
‘In all of our time working with Dame Sally Davies we agreed that the country should prepare for all health protection threats including infections caused by different organisms such as coronaviruses.’
Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed to an independent public inquiry into the coronavirus response in July – for which Dame Sally will be a key witness.
PHE was officially axed in August by the Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who claimed the decision was not to do with the agency’s handling of the pandemic.
The remains of PHE will be subsumed into the new National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP), which will also involve the Joint Biosecurity Centre — an agency created in May and ran out of the Cabinet Office.
PHE’s work on obesity and other public health issues will be handed over to local councils and GPs from the spring.
A government spokesperson said: ‘This is an unprecedented pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided at all times by the best scientific advice, to protect the NHS and save lives.
‘There is a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes, all of which would not be possible without the years of preparation undertaken for a pandemic, including flu and other infectious diseases like MERS, SARS and Ebola.’
A spokesman for Public Health England added planning for an influenza pandemic was the focus as it was top of the National Risk Assessment.
It comes after a further 33,470 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus were announced in the UK yesterday, the highest daily figure recorded since the outbreak began.
There have been 67,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.
