Thread by @postpolionews

#Book: Spike - The Virus vs The People - #TheInsideStory | @JeremyFarrar @anjahuja | @ProfileBooks bit.ly/3CzqdwY #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #PublicHealth #GlobalHealth #UK #UKGovernment #SAGE #RecommendedRead

Jeremy Farrar recounts: Even if the [SAGE] minutes were hazy, I believe that Patrick [Vallance] and Chris [Whitty] took a clear message into Number 10 after that Friday 13 March SAGE meeting: measures had to start immediately.

Meanwhile, my email to Patrick and Chris on Saturday 14 March 2020 tried to capture very explicitly what was hampering the UK’s ability to respond.

First, the state of public health at the time a country enters a crisis is crucial.

In February, Public Health England could cope with perhaps five coronavirus cases per week. It was the kind of testing capacity you might expect in a low-income country: you cannot invent resources that are not there, and therefore, if a crisis hits, you have to ration them.

Neither can you turn on capacity when you need it because everyone is chasing the same items. The virus was on every continent: there was a shortage of absolutely everything, from the enzymes needed for the tests, to the tests themselves.

We were hearing outrageous stories of countries outbidding each other in airport hangers, to poach PPE supplies already contractually promised elsewhere.

So, faced with a capacity of five cases a week, where would that testing bring the most benefit? It had to be in hospital.

That renders the tip of the iceberg visible. But it meant dropping community testing (Cummings claims it was dropped as part of the herd immunity plan).

Embarrassingly, around the time of that decision on 12 March, the WHO was urging countries to ‘test, test, test’.

I remember Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer, saying publicly that the UK did not need to follow the WHO’s advice because it did not apply to high-income countries. It was a dreadful thing to say.

There was no public acknowledgement that abandoning community testing was a decision based not on public health or science considerations but on a lack of testing capacity.

It meant we were flying blind when it came to transmission outside of hospitals, in the community and in care homes.

The idosyncratic British approach baffled observers at the WHO, including Maria Van Kerkhove, in the Health Emergencies Programme and a key figure in the agency’s Covid-19 response.

Maria recalls: ‘The attitude was, “Don’t worry, that’s China, that’s not here. That’s Lombardy, that’s not here. We’ve got this.”

I heard many people on UK media in the beginning say, “No, that won’t happen here, we have a very strong health system that will deal with it, nothing to see here.” Many other countries did the same thing. It was hubris.'

Spike pp 123/124

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