Pandemic Lessons were learned - but ignored before Covid

The latest report from the UK Covid Inquiry is damning. Care homes in Scotland and across the UK were effectively abandoned as an afterthought as the virus swept over us. Hospitals pushed to overcapacity were prioritised to the point that vulnerable patients were dumped into care homes alongside equally vulnerable residents without even a test to make sure they were Covid-free (or, uniquely in Scotland, sometimes despite knowing that they weren’t) never mind more comprehensive measures such as quarantines.

Other failings in the report highlighted the lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) led to the virus being transmitted to staff and then between patients, the reliance by the private sector on agency staff meant that the virus was transmitted between care homes, breaching any hope of isolation. The UK Government’s claim that a “protective ring” had been thrown around care homes has been described as nothing more than a “cruel lie”.

This report is large, it is thorough, and it lays out the failures of the UK and devolved governments in excruciating detail. It is also being published more than six years after the events it covers. Common Weal published our own study of the impact of the pandemic in care homes in May 2020, immediately after the start of the pandemic when we were contacted by Nick Kempe – now convenor of our Care Reform Group – who described it as an entirely predictable crisis. The differences between his paper then and the Inquiry report this week are merely differences in scope and scale, rather than identifiable outcomes or specific recommendations.

The reason for this is highlighted in both reports. The “lessons that must be learned” as a result of this Covid inquiry are not new and did not become apparent solely as a result of the pandemic. Both Scotland and the UK had learned some lessons from the 2009 swine flu pandemic and in 2016 wargamed scenarios for a future infectious virus in Scotland’s Exercise Silver Swan and the UK’s Exercise Cygnus. Both identified many of the shortcomings that would later cause the predictable crisis in 2020.

The problem is that while “lessons were learned” during these exercises, few of them were actually implemented. Very possibly one of the most damning sentences in the entire inquiry report refers to “Lesson Identified 19” from the outcomes of Exercise Cygnus: ‘There should be an examination (it was not specified by whom) of the “possibility of expanding social care real-estate and staffing capacity in the event of a worst case scenario pandemic”’ [emphasis ours]

This is the root of the predictable crisis. The lessons were learned in the abstract but as a result the responsibility of implementing the lessons remained nebulous and therefore required actions simply didn’t happen.

If we are to truly prevent another crisis of the kind that killed thousands of vulnerable people and traumatised thousands of care workers or if we are to prevent another crisis of a different kind overtaking us then the lessons must be learned by the people with the power to make sure that the actions called for by those lessons are implemented.

With that power must come the responsibility for failure. The people who failed to implement those lessons before Covid should be specified and identified, as should the people who hold that same responsibility now. The plan of actions undertaken as a result of the lessons learned from this inquiry should be published so that we can have confidence that recommendations are actually being implemented. As we wrote later in the pandemic “The public cannot know if plans have been implemented and cannot hold Government to account for their failures unless we know what the plans and recommendations are”.

It is a mistake to believe that the UK was somehow caught entirely surprised by the Covid pandemic and that the suffering and death that rode as a wave through our care homes was inevitable. The truth is that the warning signs were there long before the virus infected the first human. It was the complacency of our governments and their lack of action that caused everything else.