How Britain lost the war against coronavirus

Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military commander, said that all battles are won or lost before they are ever fought. By first week of February, the UK and many other European countries had lost the battle against coronavirus. Another of my favourite life sayings is that ‘Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups’. Assumptions by UK government, Sage, NHS, Public Health England and the Department of Health and Social Care were certainly the mother and father of this one.

The NHS, PHE and Sage thought they were well prepared for a pandemic: there were dozens of reports, response strategies, protocols, operating plans, models, transmission studies — you name it, there was a long document about it. There was even a full simulation, Exercise Cygnus, in 2016. Just one problem: all the preparations and models were essentially based around influenza. And Covid-19 is not the flu.

Returning to military analogies, when the Covid-19 outbreak began to spread, the UK was fully prepared for a full-frontal onslaught by infantry, tanks and traditional forces arriving from China. But instead, large numbers of undetected undercover agents swarmed in from Italy and Spain in early and mid February and suddenly executed shattering attacks on our most vulnerable targets. Morale was destroyed, the battle was lost.

Classic influenza epidemic guidance from NHS and PHE as to what symptoms to look out for were broadly useless, because Covid-19 is frequently asymptomatic or very mild in young healthy people. It was silently carried into inpatient hospital wards, where it exploded — and turned out to be lethal to the elderly and the ill. Was this allowed for in the preparations or assumed in the models? No preparation had been done to protect institutions housing the sick or frail.