June 2020

5th June

The chairman of parliament’s public accounts committee said that both it and the National Audit Office would be scrutinising contracts for personal protective equipment awarded by the Department of Health and Social Care “to ensure that they represented value for money”. This was after details emerged of contracts awarded to a family-run pest-control company (worth around £108 million to a company with net assets of £18,000) and to a wholesaler of coffee, tea, cocoa and spices (worth £2.15 million to supply medical and surgical facemasks). [Appendix 8]

 

15th June

Wearing of face masks on public transport in England was made compulsory (with some exceptions). Similar rules came into effect in Scotland on 22nd June, Northern Ireland on 10th July and Wales on 27th July.

 

16th June

It was reported that the Home Office’s passenger locator form, to be completed online by people arriving in the country in order to trace COVID-19 cases, included some intriguing points of departure including, for instance: Upper Volta, which became Burkino Faso (meaning “land of incorruptible people”) in 1984; the German Democratic Republic which ceased to exist in 1990; the USSR which collapsed in 1991; Czechoslovakia which ceased to have that name in 1992; along with Yugoslavia which started to break up in the early 1990s; and even more remarkably Southern Rhodesia, which became part of Zimbabwe in 1965. The Home Office explained it as an IT cock-up caused by using a list of where people might have been born.

 

18th June

A book by Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, was published under the title: The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again. In it, he condemned most countries’ responses to coronavirus, describing it as the greatest science policy failure in a generation.

In an interview with New Scientist he said that the UK had been “too late with everything”. The Lancet had published five papers in the last week of January that told the entire story: a new virus, rapidly killing people, human-to-human transmission.

Asked how the UK should have reacted, he said that WHO had called a public health emergency of international concern on 30th January, and in the next six weeks the UK government had taken its eye off the ball.

“Nobody can say we didn’t know this was coming,” he said. "Pandemics are number one on our national risk register… We had chief medical officers standing up saying that we were well-prepared for this pandemic. Although individually they were excellent scientists, the system in which they worked failed. We are talking about tens of thousands of deaths that were preventable.”

Asked why The Lancet had accepted a subsequently retracted paper on using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, Mr Horton said the paper had passed through peer review and the paper had been taken as being an accurate description of a piece of science.

 

18th June

The Health Secretary said that Britain would eventually get a COVID-19 tracking app that worked after ministers abandoned NHS-made technology following its failure in a trial on the Isle of Wight. Officials said that the NHS app, once praised by Mr Hancock as “vital for lifting lockdown” and described by Boris Johnson as a central part of the UK’s test and trace system, did not work on Apple iPhones.

The health service’s digital arm, NHSX, reportedly ditched plans to create its own app to work with Apple and Google to improve their existing technology. Officials refused to reveal how much money has been spent on the now-scrapped app but it was believed to be many millions of pounds.

The app was originally promised for mid-May but was unable to spot 25 per cent of nearby Android users and 96 per cent of iPhones in the Isle of Wight trial whereas the Apple and Google technology could spot 99 per cent of close contacts using any type of smartphone but could not tell how far away they are, officials claimed.

The NHS app had faced a series of setbacks since ministers announced it was being developed, with many people raising serious privacy concerns, others saying it wouldn’t work in crowded tower blocks where people live in close proximity, and constant delays putting back its launch date at first by weeks and then months.

Mr Hancock told BBC Breakfast in May that it would be an “incredibly important part” of Britain’s fight against the virus.

The government said it would now focus on contact tracing using people, for which it had hired 25,000.

In early August it was revealed that ministers had decided to launch a scaled back version of the app after accepting that it was insufficiently accurate to be used for contact tracing – and this was eventually launched in mid-September.

 

20th June

The Economist, not a publication known for hyperbole, said that the British state provided a case study in how not to respond to a pandemic. “It’s not Britain’s finest hour,” the magazine editorialised, adding “The country has the wrong government for a pandemic,” and “The evidence so far suggests that the British government played a bad hand badly.” It also stated: “Even after the evidence became clear the country was heading for a catastrophe, the government was slow to impose the sort of lockdown seen across Europe.”

Some of the SAGE committee’s advice seemed questionable, the magazine said, and perhaps the government should have questioned the experts more closely but it was “getting advice it wanted to hear”, the magazine said, quoting Sir Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London.

 

21st June

In the United States, President Donald Trump said he asked officials to conduct fewer coronavirus tests to reduce the number of confirmed cases in the country. He called testing a double-edged sword that led to more cases being discovered and he blamed the soaring number of cases in the US on the fact that 25 million people had been tested. A White House official said later that Mr Trump had been joking. [Health experts in the US and elsewhere regarded testing as a crucial tool in bringing the virus under control, identifying infected people so they and their contacts could isolate from others.]

• Mr Trump was right on one point: the more testing, the more cases uncovered. No one will ever know how many people were infected with COVID-19. It is highly likely that many thousands of people in the UK – and even more in the US and elsewhere – had mild symptoms but neither saw a doctor nor had a test and made a full recovery in a relatively short time. They are unlikely to appear in any statistics relating to the disease.

 

24th June

Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that no country in the world had a functioning contact-tracing app – a claim he was to repeat a week later – when more than 20 countries, including Germany, had fully functioning ones. The German one had by this date been downloaded more than 12 million times and the South Korean one had proved extraordinarily effective, even locating people doing naughty things.

 

30th June

During an interview on the BBC Breakfast programme, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock was asked why the government had stopped publishing figures on the numbers of people being tested for COVID-19. His reply: “We are publishing a huge amount of data and what I’m saying is that as it was, as it was measured, this specific figure that you’re asking for, it it just doesn’t add anything to the battle against coronavirus and it doesn’t help people to know what to do at the local level because of the fact that we are now several months, uh, into this fight, so I’m, you know, I’m perfectly, I’m happy. We are working with the UK statistics authority as it happens. We are trying to find a way to publish it in a way that is meaningful. The meaningful figure is how many tests are being conducted.”

 

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