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Covid news live: NHS chiefs admit being ‘ill-prepared’ at start of pandemic



UK ‘waited too long’ to impose COVID-19 lockdown, costing thousands of lives: report

An NHS official has said the health service was “initially ill-prepared for a pandemic” on the same day a damning report on the government’s Covid response was released.

Saffron Cordery from NHS Providers said trusts “did not get the support they needed” from government “quickly enough” in areas such as access to PPE and testing.

Her comments came as a new report said mistakes at the start of the Covid pandemic cost lives and the government’s initial policy “one of the most important public health failures” ever in the UK.

The joint inquiry by the Science and Technology Committee and the  Health and Social Care Committee said the UK’s preparation for a pandemic was far too focused on flu and ministers waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020.

The MPs also said while herd immunity was not an official government strategy, there was a “policy approach of fatalism about the prospects for Covid in the community”.

Stephen Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister, refused to apologise and insisted the government “did take decisions to move quickly” in the wake of the report’s publication.

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‘Unacceptably high’ death rates in Bame communities

Meanwhile Nadine White, our race correspondent, has reported on its findings on the impact on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

The inquiry slammed “unacceptably high” death rates among people from Bame communities that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 11:34

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‘We know the service was initially ill-prepared for a pandemic’

Saffron Cordrey from NHS Providers said there was “much to learn” from the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic.

“While there is much the NHS did well during the pandemic, we know the service was initially ill-prepared for a pandemic, and there were areas, such as access to PPE and testing, where trusts did not get the support they needed from central government quickly enough,” she said.

“A lack of coherent national policy making to protect social care and care homes, the speed with which social distancing measures were adopted and later lifted by government, and the performance of the Test and Trace system, have all understandably come under criticism.”

She added: “The consequences of those decisions have left a devastating legacy: over 150,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 across the UK with a tragic and disproportionate impact on health and care staff from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the exposure of deep social, economic and health inequalities for Black, Asian and minority communities, which will take years to address.“

She said the public inquiry into Covid had to explore whether the country could have been better prepared and whether the government made decisions at the right time.

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 11:23

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Report’s findings on care homes

May Bulman, our social affairs correspondent, has also taken a look at the inquiry’s findings on care homes.

The report said the number of Covid deaths in UK care homes was among the highest in Europe, which could have been avoided if they had not been mistakenly treated as an “afterthought”.

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 11:11

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Key findings from report

The UK has been reacting to a new report this morning that criticised the government for it response to the Covid pandemic.

Here is a quick look at some of its key findings:

  • Government experts were fixated on influenza prior to 2020 and did not see coronaviruses as a threat to the UK
  • The government initially adopted a “deliberate policy” that “amounted in practice” to seeking herd immunity. The decision to manage, rather than suppress, infections proved fatal for tens of thousands
  • The abandonment of community testing on 12 March was a “seminal failure” and “cost many lives”
  • NHS Test and Trace has “failed to make a significant enough impact on the course of the pandemic to justify the level of public investment it received”
  • Social care has been overlooked by the government throughout the pandemic, while minority ethnic communities experienced higher levels of death in its early phase.

To find out more about what the wide-reaching report found, read this by our science correspondent Sam Lovett:

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 11:00

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‘Fatalism’ in early days, former health secretary says

Jeremy Hunt said there was a “fatalism” in the early days of the pandemic response which led the government to believe that widespread immunity was the only way to stop coronavirus.

“I think we wanted to do everything we could, but once we had concluded there was community transmission, that was going to be very difficult to do,” the former health secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

Mr Hunt – who chairs one of the committee’s behind the new report – also said part of the reason was the government believed some of the measures taken to curb the spread of the virus in China, where the pandemic originated, “would not be possible in a democracy”.

Additional reporting by PA

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 10:46

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‘Issue of hindsight’

Stephen Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister, has been speaking to the media this morning after the report was released.

On Covid deaths, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Well, look – as the Prime Minister said in May, he was sorry for the suffering the country has experienced, we take responsibility for everything that has happened, and that is why we’ve committed to an inquiry in order to get the answers to what has happened and to explain to those families the basis of the decisions that have been taken.”

And asked if the government was slow to go into lockdown, he said there was an issue of “hindsight”.

“At the time of the first lockdown the expectation was that the tolerance in terms of how long people would live with lockdown for was a far shorter period than actually has proven to be the case, and therefore there was an issue of timing the lockdown and ensuring that that was done at the point of optimal impact,” he said.

The minister added: “We now know that there was much more willingness for the country to endure that than was originally envisaged.”

Additional reporting by PA

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 10:33

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Covid death toll figures

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released their latest statistics on the UK’s Covid death toll on the same day as the a damning report into the government’s response.

A total of 163,437 deaths have occurred in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The highest number on a single day was 1,484 on 19 January.

During the first wave of the virus, the daily toll peaked at 1,461 on 8 April last year.

Additional reporting by PA

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 10:25

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‘Some of the advice that he got was also wrong’

Jeremy Hunt told Good Morning Britain the prime minister was “ultimately responsible” for not locking down early enough, but that some advice he received was “also wrong”.

“There was a groupthink that the way you tackle a pandemic should be similar to a flu pandemic, I was part of that groupthink too when I was health secretary,” the Tory MP added.

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 10:10

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Minister refuses to apologise for failings ‘costings thousands of lives’

Holly Bancroft has the full story on Stephen Barclay’s refusal to apologise in light of the report’s findings this morning:

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 09:42

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Minister ‘does not accept we were late to lockdown’

Stephen Barclay also told Good Morning Britain he does not “accept we were late to lockdown”.

When pressed on the findings of the report, which says thousands of lives could have been saved if lockdown happened earlier, he said there was a “wide range of views” among the programme’s own viewers on whether lockdown was too strict, too long or not enough.

Zoe Tidman12 October 2021 09:02



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