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The Tory MP Greg Clark, who co-authored the report with Hunt and chairs the Commons science and technology committee, has told BBC Breakfast other countries – particularly some in East Asia – were able to quickly mobilise their testing and isolation regimes, allowing them to get a grip on the pandemic.
In comparison, he said increasing testing capacity in the UK was “painfully” slow. This had an impact on care homes, Clark added, because testing everyone being transferred there from hospital would have prevented the “seeding of infections into care homes”.
But, even with the limited testing capacity that we had, we should have been more rigorous in the regime around care homes – that’s to say, when people did go into care homes from hospitals, we should have been tougher in requiring that they went into isolation facilities.
Germany did that and imposed that and they had a better record initially on care homes. Other countries in East Asia also did that … so there are lessons that we need to learn now, to put in place, so that this can’t happen again.
We say this was like a football match with two very different halves, and yes there were those very serious errors that … led to many tragedies.
But, in the second half of the match, we have the vaccine programme which was – we say – the most effective initiative in the history of British science and public administration. We had the discovery of treatments like dexamethasone in the UK, which saved a million lives worldwide, we had that extraordinary response in the NHS which saw everyone who needed a ventilator and an intensive care bed got one.
We don’t think there was any desire for the whole population to be infected, but there was a fatalism that it was likely that, in the end, that would be the only way that we would stop the progress of the virus.
I think we wanted to do everything we could, but once we had concluded there was community transmission, that was going to be very difficult to do.