'Outdated, abandoned, labyrinthine': Covid inquiry finds how UK's health system failed people during pandemic

The United Kingdom under Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was "ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the Covid-10 pandemic that actually struck", a damning first report from an inquiry on UK's Covid preparedness has found. 

"The institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were labyrinthine in their complexity," Chair of the Covid inquiry Lady Hallett said in her report. 

The report further said that the UK government's sole pandemic strategy from 2011, was "outdated and lacked adaptability". 

"It was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with the pandemic," it noted, adding that the existing mechanism "failed adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response". 

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Lady Hallett's 240-page report, analysed by WION, shows that the emergency planning of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government failed to account sufficiently for the "pre-existing health and social inequalities and deprivation in society". 

"There was a failure to learn sufficiently from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of diseases."

Additionally, there was a "damaging absence" of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic, "in particular, a system that could be scaled up to test, trace and isolate in the event of a pandemic." 

In an indirect dig at Boris Johnson's premiership, the Covid inquiry report found that in the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a "lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight." 

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"Ministers, who are frequently untrained in the specialist field of civil contingencies, were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers."

Besides, "advisers and advisory groups did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views and suffered from a lack of significant external oversight and challenge. The advice was often undermined by groupthink."