Another pandemic as big as the Covid crisis, which has killed seven million people worldwide, is “a certainty”, warned Prof. Sir Chris Whitty, as he said Britain’s lack of intensive care capacity for the sickest patients was a “political choice”.
The NHS faced an “absolutely catastrophic situation” when the virus first struck in 2020, but it could have been “significantly worse” if Britain had not gone into lockdown, Britain’s chief medical officer has said.
“We must assume that a pandemic of this magnitude will occur in the future,” he told the public inquiry into Covid-19 on Thursday. “That’s a certainty.”
It would also be “foolish” not to assume that asymptomatic transmission of a deadly virus would occur again, he added.
Whitty’s warning came after a doctor repeatedly broke down in tears during the inquest as he described how the Covid crisis for NHS staff was like having to respond to a “terrorist attack” every day, with infected patients “raining from the sky” ”.
Professor Kevin Fong – a former clinical consultant in preparedness, resilience and emergency response at NHS England, who was on duty during the 7/7 London bombings – said the scale of deaths in hospitals at the height of the pandemic was “truly astonishing.”
Some intensive care units in England were so overwhelmed that staff had to put dead bodies in clear plastic bin bags after body bags ran out, and then immediately put another Covid patient in that person’s bed, Fong said.
Giving evidence after Fong, Whitty said expanding the NHS’s capacity could help it better deal with a wave of sick patients in the future. “If we take the ICU (intensive care units) in particular, Britain has very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peers in high-income countries,” he said. “That is a choice, that is a political choice.
“It’s a system configuration choice, but it’s a choice. Therefore, you have less reserve if a major emergency occurs, even if it is not as large as the magnitude of Covid.”
Whitty said solving the NHS staffing crisis was also crucial. Healthcare systems cannot be “scaled up” in a future pandemic without “trained people,” he added.
“You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put oxygen in them and things like that… But fundamentally the limit of that system, as with any system, is training people, and it is impossible to train someone in six to train for weeks. have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It’s simply not possible.
“So if you don’t have the emergency – if it’s an emergency at this speed of onset – don’t be under any illusions that you’re going to have it when you get to the top.”
Whitty said that among his other recommendations, the ability to conduct rapid scientific research and reducing health inequalities deserved the most attention. “If we don’t seriously try to address health inequalities between pandemics, there’s no way you can do that when the pandemics happen,” he said.
“The biggest one that I think deserves a little more emphasis is the mechanism for being able to do research very, very quickly.”
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Referring to the development of vaccines and treatments, he added: “I think people always underestimate at the beginning of pandemics that it is actually the science that will get them out of the hole, and not all the other things. The other things hold the line until science does the work.”
Whitty said that in addition to direct damage from Covid, such as deaths and long Covid, there was also indirect damage “arising from the system being overwhelmed or at least unable to cope… all diseases, not just Covid, have higher death rates than them. would have had.”
He admitted that reporting on which masks NHS staff should wear to protect themselves from Covid was “quite confused” at the start of the pandemic. He also said officials “didn’t get across well enough” that the public should continue to go to hospital for serious illnesses other than Covid. There would never be a “perfect balance” when it came to stay-at-home messages, he said.
“We tried…we tweeted, we talked onstage, etcetera. Whether we have overemphasized the message about the risks of Covid, I think that is actually a much more difficult issue.”
Whitty said he still worries today whether the government has “the right level of concern” about the dangers of Covid in 2020. “Had we either gone too far into it so that people were incredibly scared of something while their actuarial risk was in fact low? Or had we not pitched it enough and therefore people did not realize the risk they were running?
“I think that balance is very difficult, and some people might say we overdid it in the beginning, rather than under it.”
In a statement, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, which represents thousands of people, said the scenes described in intensive care units “were not inevitable, can never be considered acceptable and should never be repeated”.