The UK Covid Public Inquiry has published its first Report, on Resilience and Preparedness. It is the most urgent report, as we are still ill-prepared for the next pandemic.
This is the first of many reports, each reviewing a specific area, including healthcare systems; test, trace, and isolate; and the economic response to the pandemic.
The Module 1 Report sets out nine significant flaws from the Covid-19 pandemic:
The Report suggests 10 recommendations:
It is clear from Lady Hallett’s report that all these recommendations need to be implemented, as the response needs to be systematic rather than component-based. This system-level response is welcome.
As Lady Hallett summed up, ‘Unless the lessons are learned and fundamental change is implemented, the human and financial cost and sacrifice of the Covid-19 pandemic will have been in vain.’
The UK resilience framework, and the Resilience Approach, was adopted in the early 2000s. The risk is that we now new, improved, resilience framework, but this will then lead to an efficiency drive that leaves such resilence poorly exposed.
What Now?
The Covid-19 Inquiry was announced in Parliament in May 2021, instigated in June 2022 and it has taken us over two years from then to get to this point. In terms of formal planning for a pandemic, the Influenza Pandemic plan still dates back to pre-Covid times. ‘Key learnings’ from previous simulations are published, but have not been implemented.
The risk is that the recommendations from the Covid Inquiry also become ‘key learnings’. It is imperative that the new Government takes the Covid Inquiry report seriously, and implements it.
The pandemic response structure in the UK was a mess in the run-up to Covid, and, although changes have been made, the civil preparedness and resilience structure remains unclear, hence the recommendation for reform.
The next pandemic is coming, it’s just that we don’t know what it will be. We now have H5 Avian flu in humans following exposure to dairy cows. The passing of animal diseases to humans, so called zoonoses, could adapt and potentially lead to a next pandemic.
We are not prepared for that.
Many thanks.
I hope you and the interdisciplinary collegiate you joined (ISAGE) can continue to contribute to 'intellectual' analysis of 'risk assessment', and in particular, 'the precautionary principle'. Historically, risk assessment methodology has been poor right from the beginning of modern approaches to ‘free trade' when globalisation accelerated. This was noticeably so in the Britain of BSE. Risk assessment had not improved by the time of Foot & Mouth. Old 'plans' being pulled out of the drawer because attention had too long been elsewhere, and a delayed response in the face of modern distribution of vectors, were features of the F&M epidemic, and catastrophically repeated again with covid. A depleted public organisation could not knowledgeably respond in local detail.
One suggestion now might be to give close attention to sets of differing ‘worst-case scenarios’ within the concept of 'the precautionary principle'. To my mind these need developing at the minimum for the range of direct impacts of a morbid/lethal infection on different demographics. We got lucky with covid!
We are in changing circumstances. Incredibly complex supply chains present a modern context for many different kinds of 'emergency' situations of which lightening fast pandemic spread and its biological evolution is only one systemic risk.
A last thought; education in reading data and understanding exponentially changing phenomena might help for our 'educated' and 'political' classes!
Many thanks for the summary which is excellent & really helpful. The civil emergencies setup is hopelessly complex & outdated and reads like something from a manual written by Col Blimp, post retirement. Whether those involved see the urgent need to consign the "command" tradition to the past, is something else, sadly