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A pandemic has been warned of for years. But the government’s flat-footed response betrays its lack of emergency experts

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Twelve years ago, I attended a conference on public health where a leading expert on pandemics introduced his talk by saying: “My task is to tell you things you don’t want to know, and ask you to spend money you haven’t got on something you don’t think will happen.” He then went on to describe, in considerable detail, a scenario for a global pandemic that was eerily similar to the one we’re currently experiencing.
Fast-forward more than a decade, and it seems the UK government was badly prepared for the coronavirus pandemic. It’s not as if we didn’t have prior warning that an event like this was a threat. Though Exercise Cygnus of 2016 remains shrouded in mystery, the government’s national risk register of civil emergencies has long put pandemics at the top of the list of risks the UK faces. In the 2017 register, a virus symbol sits in the top right-hand corner of a diagram of likelihood versus consequences. The UK’s strategy for managing a pandemic, meanwhile, was first published in 2011. But by 2014, government attention had turned away from pandemic preparation and back to counter-terrorism planning. And by 2016, planners in the UK were fully engaged in confronting the supply-chain disaster that would be Brexit, struggling to figure out how, for example, to boost the UK’s coffee supply. Continue reading...