Coronavirus complacency to calamity

The story in March about Britain’s readiness for a global pandemic could not have been so starkly different to the story today.

Hiram Johnson, a Californian Republican Senator, said at the start of World War One:

“The first  casualty, when war comes, is truth.”

It seems we can say the same when a pandemic comes.

On Friday 6 March - just 44 days ago - Asa Bennett, the Telegraph’s ‘Brexit commissioning editor’, wrote an article for the paper with the headline, ‘Firmly and calmly, the UK is leading Europe in the fight against the coronavirus.’

He extolled the performance of health secretary, Matt Hancock, on the previous night’s edition of BBC Question Time.

The programme, reported Mr Bennett, ‘was dominated by Matt Hancock engaging with the public on how best to tackle the coronavirus.’

Wrote Mr Bennett:

‘That was quite right, as the Health Secretary showed he recognised the gravity of the burgeoning epidemic while seeking to reassure his audience and offer practical advice (like that the public does not need to stockpile as "the Government has supplies of the key things that are needed").’

He went on:

‘Such reassurance was welcome, as one in four voters admit to being scared of the coronavirus. One can easily forget that tens of thousands have recovered from the coronavirus after being diagnosed with it, and that the flu has proven to be much deadlier than Covid-19.*’

The Government, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, was providing an early sign of their ‘pragmatic and proportionate approach’ towards the epidemic, he wrote.

He added that a poll by YouGov had found that 54% voters thought the government was handling the situation well.

? 'UK BEST IN WORLD IN FIGHTING DISEASE LIKE COVID-19'

Commented Mr Bennett, ‘This may well stem from the fact that the UK is empirically the most capable country in Europe at dealing with an epidemic,’ according to the Global Health Security Index, compiled just four months earlier.

Furthermore:

‘Boffins deemed that the UK was second only to the United States in its ability to deal with medical threats, and the best in the world at fighting a disease like Covid-19 (or as they put it, at providing a "rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of an epidemic").’

This was borne out, claimed Mr Bennett, because other countries, such as Italy, had been hit much harder with the coronavirus than Britain.

Asserted Mr Bennett:

‘As a hub for world-class research and science, the UK has shown itself to lead Europe on health security.’

And he concluded:

‘The UK has been faring better than its European neighbours in the fight against the coronavirus, with Mr Johnson and his colleagues displaying the firmness and calm expected by the public.’

? A DIFFERENT COUNTRY? A WORK OF FICTION?

By contrast, read today’s front page story on the Sunday Times, and Mr Bennett might have been writing about a completely different country – or simply a work of fiction.

The Sunday Times front-page investigation, compiled by the newspaper’s Insight team, was headlined:

‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’

And the subheading summarised:

‘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.’

‘On the third Friday of January a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the world,’ started the dramatic account of the spread of coronavirus.

‘Passing from person to person and borne on ships and planes, the coronavirus was already leaving a trail of bodies.

‘The virus had spread from China to six countries and was almost certainly in many others. Sensing the coming danger, the British government briefly went into wartime mode that day, holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis committee.

‘But it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat.

‘Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.

‘This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.’

Britain’s tardiness in dealing with the deadly global pandemic has probably resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths, according to the report.

? CATALOGUE OF ERRORS

Today’s Sunday Times catalogued a shocking list of errors by the government, revealing a far different version of events than the one published by The Telegraph just a few weeks ago.

? It wasn’t until 2 March that Boris Johnson first attended a Cobra meeting about the emerging coronavirus, having missed five earlier meetings to discuss the virus. ‘But by then,’ reported the Sunday Times, ‘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 insidious virus to have hit the world in a century.’

? Mr Johnson was absent from those earlier, vital meetings, according to a ‘senior 10 Downing Street adviser’ who ‘broke ranks’ to talk with the Sunday Times because, “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.”

? Key key points that are likely to be explored by a future public inquiry, according to the Sunday Times, will be why, it took so long to recognise an urgent need for a massive boost in supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; and tests to detect the infection.’

? Any inquiry, asserted the ST, ‘may also ask whether the government’s failure to get to grips with the scale of the crisis in those early days had the knock-on effect of the national lockdown being introduced days or even weeks too late, causing many thousands more unnecessary deaths.’

? The Sunday Times says it has ‘talked to scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners, public officials and politicians’ who told the newspaper that, contrary to the official line,

? The failure to obtain large amounts of testing equipment was another big error of judgment, according to the Downing Street source reported by the Sunday Times.

‘It would later be one of the big scandals of the coronavirus crisis that the considerable capacity of Britain’s private laboratories to mass-produce tests was not harnessed during those crucial weeks of February.’

? MY VERDICT:

The catalogue of errors in Britain’s calamitous and conceited approach to Covid-19 will – I hope – be fully investigated by a public inquiry when all this is over.

The Sunday Times agrees and editorialised:

‘One day there will be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24.

‘There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny.’

Of course, I concur. But a public inquiry at the end of all this will be too late to change anything now.

Only by fully holding to account our government today, and calling for a more urgent and co-ordinated response, might more lives be saved tomorrow.

That’s surely one of the key functions of journalism – and our Opposition, which has been stymied from properly challenging the government because Parliament has been closed to normal business for weeks.

Parliament is due to open this coming week. Opposition parties and MPs have a lot of catching up to do. Not holding the government to account hasn’t resulted in fewer deaths; it’s put all of us in danger.

DEATH RATES*: The Telegraph report claimed that ‘the flu has proven to be much deadlier than Covid-19’, Current data does not support that view. Although the UK does not routinely collect data on deaths from seasonal flu, we know from USA data that around .1% of those who get seasonal flu each year die from it.

The rate of death for Covid-19 is around 10 times more lethal at 1%. However the data is rapidly being updated as more information becomes available, with a wide range of estimates for coronavirus death rates, from as low as 1 in 1000 to as high as 1 in 30.

• Report and graphic by Jon Danzig
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