James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three mistakes the UK made at the start of the corona crisis

Boris Johnson (photo: Getty)

There are three areas where government policy now implicitly accepts that they made mistakes in their earlier handling of the pandemic. The first is the desire to increase testing to 200,000 tests a day. This suggests that the earlier decision to pull back from a test and trace strategy because the infection was being spread in the community was due to a lack of a testing capacity; something that could have been remedied if the government and Public Health England had adopted the collaborative approach to testing that they now have.

The second is care homes. It is now clear that the policy of discharging people from hospitals into care homes without waiting for a negative Covid-19 test first was a massive mistake that has made the situation in care homes far worse than it otherwise would have been. Talking to those involved in these decisions, it is clear that the problem was that the view in February and for most of March was that the asymptomatic could not transmit the virus. So, the NHS – which was under huge pressure to free up beds – thought it was safe to discharge people back to care homes who did not have a cough or temperature. We now know, though, that people are often most infectious just before they display symptoms.

Quarantine for those arriving from abroad is the third area where government policy suggests it was wrong before. If it is right to require those coming from abroad to isolate for 14 days once infections in the UK drop further, then it surely would have been the right approach in February and early March.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in