Covid-19: ‘Official–sensitive’ but a pandemics cover-up

• I WELCOME the January 29 letters from Peter Cave (Remember how ministers’ early policies let us down) and Harold Lind (Our defences against pandemic were woeful) on the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Any inquiry into this crisis must go back to the Public Health England, Exercise Cygnus Report (Tier One Command Post Exercise Pandemic Influenza October 2016).

In 2017 it was circulated to all major government departments and devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland but marked “Official – Sensitive” and covered up for three years.

The Guardian printed the report (although with the names and email addresses of government officials redacted) in May 2020.

But it was only officially made public (and largely overlooked in the media) on October 23 2020 after a legal challenge by Dr Moosa Qureshi and journalist Tommy Green to health minister Matt Hancock and questions in the House of Commons.

This report stated as its “key learning” that “the UK’s preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies and capability, is currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors”.

Even though Cygnus co-ordinated 950 people, from Department of Health ministers to teams of local emergency planners and prison officers, to test the UK’s response to a new global pandemic, its recommendations were ignored.

The exercise even included four dummy Cobra meetings, over three days, as ministers were tasked with imagining that the UK was facing a peak of infections.

The final report recommended that the social care system needed to be able to expand if it were to cope with a “worst case scenario pandemic”, and that money should be ring-fenced to provide extra capacity and support to the NHS.

Instead we had austerity and continuing cuts to the health service, local authorities and pharmacies.

We all now know the results of ignoring and hiding this report: the PPE scandal, the failure of test-and-trace, the watering down of lockdowns, the terrible toll on care home residents, health and care staff and other public sector workers, more than 100,000 dead.

Yet we are expected to believe that there was no warning; government cannot be blamed; they are following the science and doing their best in a completely unexpected situation.

DOT GIBSON N5