LONDON: It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government. It was 'highly likely', they said, that there ...
LONDON: It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government.
Whitty passed on the modelling committee's broad conclusions, including the prediction of a possible 80 per cent infection rate and the consequent deaths. Interviews with more than 20 British scientists, key officials and senior sources in Johnson's Conservative Party, and a study of minutes of advisory committee meetings and public testimony and documents, show how these scientific advisers concluded early the virus could be devastating.
Professor John Edmunds poses for a photograph outside the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, Britain April 6, 2020. Picture taken April 6, 2020. REUTERS/Simon DawsonFrom the outset, said Edmunds, work by scientists had shown that, with only limited interventions, the virus would trigger an"overwhelming epidemic" in which Britain's health service was not going"to get anywhere near being able to cope with it. That was clear from the beginning.
Interviews and records published so far suggest that the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn't study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China, where the disease arose in December, and then followed by much of Europe and finally by Britain itself.The UK scientists were also mostly convinced - and many still are - that, once the new virus escaped China, quarantine measures would likely not succeed.
John Ashton, a clinician and former regional director of Public Health England, the government agency overseeing healthcare, said the government's advisers took too narrow a view and hewed to limited assumptions.Their handling of COVID-19, Ashton said, shows the need for a broader approach."In the future we need a much wider group of independent advisers."
"As the public would expect, we regularly test our pandemic plans and what we learned from previous exercises has helped us to rapidly respond to COVID-19."When news came from China in January of a new infectious disease, Johnson had reason to believe his country was well prepared. Edmunds and his colleague at Imperial, Neil Ferguson, were part of an alphabet soup of committees that fed advice into the Cabinet Office machinery around the prime minister.
The evidence soon changed, but this wasn't reflected in the official threat level. By the end of January, scientists in China began releasing clinical data. Case studies published in the British medical journal The Lancet showed 17 per cent of the first 99 coronavirus cases needed critical care. Eleven patients died.
Dr Jon Read, a senior lecturer in biostatistics at the University of Lancaster, also a member of SPI-M, said by the end of January it was apparent the virus had"pandemic potential" and that death rates for the elderly were brutal. Two days later, China put the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, into a complete lockdown. Hubei, the surrounding province, would follow.
"We had milder interventions in place," said Edmunds, because no one thought it would be acceptable politically"to shut the country down". That limited approach mirrored the UK's longstanding pandemic flu strategy. The Department of Health declined a request from Reuters for a copy of its updated pandemic plan, without providing a reason. But a copy of the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011, which a spokesman said was still relevant, stated the"working presumption will be that Government will not impose any such restrictions.
Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the SPI-M committee, said COVID-19 did behave differently than an expected pandemic flu - for example school closures proved to be far less effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. But, broadly,"the government has been consistently responsive to changing facts".
With Brexit done, Johnson had the chance to focus on other matters the following month, among them the emerging virus threat. But leaving the European Union had a consequence. A Downing Street aide told Reuters that from around the end of January, Johnson concentrated his attention increasingly on the coronavirus threat, receiving"very frequent" updates at least once per day from mid February, either in person or via a daily dashboard of cases.
Calling the lost chance a"national scandal" in a later editorial, he would testify to Parliament about a mismatch between"the urgent warning that was coming from the frontline in China" and the"somewhat pedestrian evaluation" of the threat from the scientific advice to the government. An executive at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford said he could have carried out up to 1,000 tests per day from February. But the call never came.
Nor was there an effective effort to expand the supply of ventilators. The Department of Health told Reuters in a statement that the government started talking to manufacturers of ventilators about procuring extra supplies in February. But it was not until Mar 16, after it was clear supplies could run out, that Johnson launched an appeal to industry to help ramp up production.
Longley, an infectious diseases consultant at London’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases, was part of a team that staffed a public health service helpline for those with symptoms. Until then, Longley said, everyone felt"there was a chance to stamp it out" even though most were skeptical it could be done long-term. But after Iran and Italy, it was obvious containment would not work.
Amid the dreadful news from Italy, the scientists at NERVTAG convened by phone on Feb 21. But they decided to recommend keeping the threat level at"moderate", where it had sat since Jan 30.
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