'[Boris Johnson’s] hospitalisation on 5 April and close brush with death will have left him with no doubts about the nature of the threat’ - Freedman, page 64.
As the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK slowly wanes, controversy wages over the more than 63,000 excess deaths between mid-March and mid-May 2020, a figure which will increase substantially over the summer and may be the largest in any European country. Deaths in residential care homes make a huge contribution to this toll: estimated at over 22,000, they represent more than 1 in 20 of the 430,000 residents in these homes compared to mortality of less than 1 per 1000 in the rest of the population. The Johnson government’s policy was strongly criticised by independent experts before it introduced a lockdown on 23 March, and it is widely believed that policy contributed to the large death tolls, including its partial ‘seeding’ of care home deaths by hospitals discharging untested COVID sufferers into them.
In these inauspicious circumstances, Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, has published a lengthy ‘preliminary account’ of scientific advice and political judgement in UK policy-making during the first phase of the pandemic: ‘Strategy for a Pandemic: The UK and COVID-19’. As one would expect it is a well-informed, often well-judged and nuanced piece. However it has important failings and should not stand unquestioned as the first cut of early UK pandemic history. Above all, it fails to address the culpable ignorance of policy-makers and advisers about the nature of the threat which British society was facing.
