Why there must be an inquiry | thearticle

The charge sheet is grim: herd immunity, the abandonment of the elderly in care homes to die, the failure to provide frontline medical staff with adequate protection, and a callous disregard

for human life as evinced in calls by its MPs for an end to the lockdown. This, at least, is the litany of complaints levelled against the government. Some of them are more plausible than

others, but cumulatively they point to the need for a public inquiry into the official response to the greatest peacetime public health crisis in living memory. And even then, some critics

will suspect an establishment plot to deflect blame. Public inquiries are typically castigated by populists on both wings of politics as a means of defusing dissent. Before they’ve reported,

and often before they’ve been established, the conclusions of the inquiries are traduced as an establishment whitewash. The truth is different. Inquiries are valuable means of arriving at

the truth of a contentious issue or public scandal, avoiding both the narrow focus of the law courts and the partisanship of political debate. If you doubt their significance, consider the

MacPherson report exposing institutional racism in the police, or the Francis inquiry into failures of care at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. They mattered, both in

investigating grievous failings in public life and in ensuring these should not happen again. The calls for an inquiry into the coronavirus crisis are already being made, and they should be

heeded once the crisis recedes and answers are in principle available about what worked and what didn’t. It’s not an accusation against the government, which has broadly adopted the right

measures of lockdown to stop the spread of infection and public spending to support jobs and business. We just need to know the extent to which, over the short and long term, public policy

might have been better prepared, based not on hindsight but on what was known at the time. And these are some of the issues that a public inquiry will need to address. Why was the

government’s early response to the crisis beset with confusion and delay? This is a damning criticism that needs to be thoroughly investigated. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies

(SAGE) held its first formal meeting about the coronavirus on 22 January — which was, as it happens the date on which the first _Times_ leader on the subject (urging quarantine measures) was

published, so it was hardly an obscure subject. By the end of January, the threat level was still only rated “moderate”. It took till 12 March, a week after the first UK death from

Covid-19, for the threat level to be raised to “high”. And not till 23 March did we enter lockdown. It is highly likely that an earlier lockdown, or at the very least an abandonment of

crowded events like the Cheltenham festival, would have saved lives. Why did the government’s chief scientific adviser speak on Radio 4’s Today programme the day after the elevation of the

threat level, on 13 March, of “herd immunity”? The concept can make sense even in the absence of a vaccine if you are immune for life from a disease once you’ve had it. But no such

confidence is available with a new coronavirus. And the inference drawn by the public was inevitably that the lives of more vulnerable people would be knowingly put at risk. A close reading

of published documents suggests (as argued by Sir Lawrence Freedman, who served on the Chilcot inquiry) a further question about the early response. Was there a delay in understanding that

the curve would be steeper than SAGE had supposed, and was there then a delay in the government’s response when this error became clear? Why was the rollout of testing so slow (as it

assuredly was)? Matt Hancock, the health secretary, acknowledged that Britain had struggled to scale up to the levels of mass testing implemented by other countries, yet appeared to blame it

on some inherent advantage possessed by economies like Germany and South Korea that have a larger diagnostics industry. It was not a convincing explanation given that testing capacity then

expanded rapidly, with the building of huge new facilities, yet the number of actual tests being conducted was far short of this capacity. Why were care homes not made a priority for the

delivery of essential testing kit, for residents and staff, from the outset? Government advice at the start of this month urged care homes to accept patients discharged from hospital in

order to free up beds, yet the residents of the homes are facing severe risks. The human costs are harrowing. The World Health Organisation said last week that up to half the

coronavirus-related deaths in Europe have happened in care facilities. Why were supplies of personal protective equipment grossly inadequate? Could they have been built up quicker? The

problem was not just lack of supply but lack of guidance to medical staff on what they should be doing in the interim. The British Medical Association said a few days after the lockdown that

it was seeking urgent clarification from the government on what risks medical staff should be taking to treat patients with Covid-19 if they lacked sufficient protective equipment. The

president of the Doctors’ Association claimed a week later that medical staff were being told to simply hold their breath if they didn’t have face masks. Those are some of the immediate

questions about the crisis that will need answering not now but later, and a public inquiry will be best fitted to answer. One of the reasons is that an inquiry can look at the longer-term

failings that contributed to the crisis. Scientists have long forecast the emergence of a pandemic that might kill scarcely imaginable numbers of people. The assumption was that it was most

likely to be an influenza virus. David Nabarro, a public health expert at the World Health Organisation, warned amid an outbreak of avian flu in Asia in 2005 that a global pandemic was

imminent and might kill up to 150 million people. Was there a way of acting on these warnings, even though there are no approved antiviral drugs or vaccines to treat or prevent Covid-19,

that might have made a difference? Finally, there is the biggest imponderable of all, which will be beyond the remit of a public inquiry. The historic crises of this century, including the

terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the collapse of the world banking system, have underlined the need for international action and a rules-based

multilateral system. The coronavirus crisis also requires a global rather than an isolationist response. Whether we get one, or whether the world’s leading democracies instead retreat behind

closed borders, may depend on providing answers to reasonable public concerns about what has gone wrong.