- THE TELEGRAPH - The Lockdown Files Team - Mar 7, 2023 -
The inside story of the 60 days that led to Boris Johnson telling the country to stay at home as the Covid crisis hit
The full force of the Covid pandemic hit the UK in March 2020 – but inside the Department for Health and Social Care, contingency planning for an unprecedented public health crisis had been under way for weeks.
China had issued its first public health alert on Dec 30, 2019 after a cluster of patients with respiratory problems was noticed in Wuhan province. By January, ministers and officials were discussing the possibility of the outbreak spreading to Europe and possibly the UK.
As the weeks passed, there was mounting frustration over Downing Street’s reluctance to engage. Number 10 was buoyed by the UK’s recent departure from the EU and did not want Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, making gloomy proclamations about diseases.
All that changed with the first UK coronavirus deaths in early March. On Monday 23rd, Mr Johnson would deliver his historic address giving the British people a “very simple instruction” to stay at home.
A small number of WhatsApp groups involving Matt Hancock show how the Government responded to the growing threat, though the vast majority of Mr Hancock’s groups, which have been passed to The Telegraph, have few or no messages covering the month of March.
One of the first people to ask questions about Covid was Gina Coladangelo, Mr Hancock’s aide and now his partner, who was part of a group chat involving the then health secretary and his special advisers:
Several hours later, a civil servant mentioned the virus in the chat:
Two weeks later, with Covid now firmly rooted in Europe, there seemed little prospect of keeping it out of the UK:
Mr Hancock spent the last week of February working on an “action plan” with his counterparts in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
In a WhatsApp group designed for quick communication between Number 10 and the Department for Health, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, and Dominic Cummings, the Downing Street policy chief, discussed claims that a vaccine could be developed within weeks:
A few minutes later, Sir Patrick sent his response:
Downing Street media advisers wondered how best to tell the public what might be coming. As they prepared to publish Mr Hancock’s action plan, they discussed giving advance briefings to a select group of national newspaper editors and specialist journalists.
In the first trial of a format that would soon become familiar to every household in the land, a carefully choreographed press conference would follow, with the prime minister at a podium flanked by scientific or medical experts – in this case Sir Chris and Sir Patrick:
That evening, Mr Cummings sent another message to the group:
Some weeks earlier, Sir Chris had privately warned that as many as 820,000 people could die, according to Mr Hancock in his book Pandemic Diaries. Although this apocalyptic projection was steadily downgraded, in the months that followed modelling “reasonable worst case scenario” infection rates and fatalities remained a central feature of pandemic policy planning.
Shocked by the potential scale of the threat, Downing Street and the Department of Health began trying to work out how to change public behaviour to reduce transmission:
Later that morning, the discussion turned to “reasonable worst-case scenario” planning:
With the Easter holidays just around the corner, the hope was to keep schools open until the end of term. However, exam season loomed and senior figures were beginning to think about how that might be affected.
There were also highly sensitive discussions about what to do if the NHS ran out of staff and beds. If push came to shove, could unqualified volunteers help in intensive care units? Could families be shown how to care for their own sick and dying?
Day by day, the disaster moved closer to home. Terrifying scenes in Italy, where hospitals were overwhelmed by gasping Covid victims and distraught doctors were having to turn away the dying patients were fuelling a sense of impending doom in the UK. Rumours swirled that Parliament might be forced to close for up to five months. A nervous public was beginning to stay away from restaurants, pubs and theatres – the start of a disastrous hiatus for the hospitality industry.
Warning that insurance would rapidly become a problem, Mr Cummings told Mr Hancock that businesses were “starting to scream” about cancellations. The Department of Health hastily registered Covid as a “notifiable disease”, making it easier for companies to claim compensation.
As people began to panic buy, the Government started talking to supermarkets about how to maintain supplies. Officials wondered whether the Government was being seen to do enough.