This autumn, the UK government will run the largest pandemic planning exercise it has ever conducted. The project is a direct response to the recommendations of the ongoing Covid inquiry, and it will test the country’s procedures and capabilities in the event of another pandemic. The imprint of the inquiry is clear to see in the inclusion of a “Risk Vulnerability Tool”, which will aim to identify which groups in society might be disproportionately affected, for example because of age, disability or socioeconomic situation.
The test will be announced in messages sent to every phone in the country. And the findings will be made public – in contrast to the now infamous Operation Cygnus, a flu pandemic exercise conducted by David Cameron’s government in 2016. The results of Cygnus were never publicly released, but showed that the country was insufficiently stocked with ventilation machines for the critically ill, a serious problem during the Covid pandemic. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, put out an urgent call for ventilators only on March 14, 2020 (“If you produce a ventilator, we will buy it. No number is too high”), little more than a week before the country locked down.
The forthcoming exercise also recognises, crucially, that the next pandemic might not be the same as the last. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, for example, it was not the elderly who were at greatest risk of dying but young people in their mid 20s or 30s. It is even conceivable that a future infectious disease could be most dangerous for children, which would hugely complicate any decision around schools – many experts now agree that closure of schools created some of the most serious social problems of the pandemic, disrupting education and the mental health of children, and widening social inequalities. Differences in the transmissibility, the mode of transmission, and the asymptomatic period of a different disease would also have significant implications for mitigation measures.
At face value, then, the autumn exercise seems to be timely and well thought through. Should anything like a lockdown need to be contemplated in future – and it is far from unlikely – we would not be improvising as we were in 2020. We now know that some interventions are more effective than others, so that any social distancing could be smarter. A major question is whether another lockdown would be tolerated at all. It’s likely that most people remain, as they were, socially responsible and ready to make sacrifices for others. But libertarian objectors have substantial support in the press and even among politicians, and would be better at mobilising than they were during Covid: the tracks are now laid for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
So good public messaging, as well as sophisticated understanding of behaviour, would be essential. (It was insufficient inclusion of informed social and behavioural science, as well as Brexit-fuelled jingoism and exceptionalism, that led to the fatal judgment in early 2020 that the “freedom-loving” British public wouldn’t stand for being told to
stay at home, or would quickly
grow weary of it.)
The social aspects of the Covid lockdown were prominent in a discussion at University College London in March of lessons learned five years on (full disclosure: I was on the panel). The former deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam – who became a household figure with his use of homely, vivid analogies from football or trains during the Covid press briefings – asserted in his opening talk that “social solidarity is the key”.
Not only did Van-Tam have a knack of connecting with the public – a task that came less easily to his more reserved number one, Chris Whitty – but he showed the resolve that both Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, seemed to lack in speaking out about Dominic Cummings’s cross-country drive to Barnard Castle in April 2020. I feel about it the same way you do, JVT (as he has branded himself) said: “the rules apply to all”.
He hinted in his talk that there may have been political blowback – he did not reappear at a press briefing for some time – but his comment, mindful of how Cummings’s behaviour could (and did) undermine public faith in the restrictions, showed that he placed a duty to the public before that to the government.
That is one issue – the independence and degree of public-facedness of the scientific advisers – the Covid inquiry seems unlikely to address. But it should. I have heard it rumoured that the constraints on advisers might even be tightened. That would be a mistake.
