The true costs of Britain's mishandling of Covid are now plain to see | Devi Sridhar
Public health experts like me were baffled by government decisions. The first official report has shown how misguided they were
In spring last year it was clear to those of us who work in global public health that the British government had taken the worst path for handling Covid-19. Ministers had allowed the virus to spread throughout the country without building any kind of surveillance system to detect cases or protecting health workers with adequate PPE. As a result of these decisions, the government then forced the country into a long, harsh lockdown in an attempt to reduce the pressure on the NHS and keep hospital admissions under control.
In April 2020 I tweeted: “At what point will the British public realise what has happened over the past 9 weeks?” At the time, I wondered whether the true costs of the government’s decisions would ever be fully reckoned with. Today, the first official report into the government’s handling of the crisis has laid bare these costs. Many of its findings, which draw on days of testimony from witnesses to the health and social care committee and science and technology committee, have long been clear to those of us working in public health. From March 2020, we were trying to make sense of daily policy decisions and press briefings that seemed to be hurtling towards catastrophe.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3asWk4D
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