The UK could have avoided the COVID-19 lockdown had it been better prepared, former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the COVID-19 public inquiry on Wednesday.
Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, faced the public inquiry for the first time on Wednesday, answering questions on why the UK was not adequately prepared for the pandemic.
One way the UK could have slowed down the spread of the pandemic was through quarantining, Hunt told the public inquiry, adding that the UK could have been better prepared.
“If there was one thing that could have slowed the progress of COVID when it actually arrived, it was to understand the importance of early quarantining to stop the disease spreading,” he said.
“I think there was a groupthink that we knew this stuff best, and there was a sense that we — with perhaps the exception of the United States, there wasn’t an enormous amount we could learn from other countries,” said Hunt, adding that the UK could have learned from South Korea, which had been better prepared and managed to avoid a lockdown during the first year of the pandemic.
Last week, the first evidence session of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry – set up to examine the country’s response to and impact of the pandemic – announced that the government’s no-deal Brexit planning crowded out efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UK’s departure from the EU “required an enormous amount of planning and preparation, particularly to address what was likely to be the severe consequences of a no-deal exit on food and medicine supplies, travel and transport, business, borders and so on,” Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, said during the session.
“There was clearly a narrowness of thinking of which, you know, I was part, which didn’t think hard enough about that kind of potential pandemic,” said Hunt.
The inquiry remains ongoing.
(Sofia Stuart Leeson | EURACTIV.com)
Read more with EURACTIV
Disappointment in the Netherlands as Agricultural Accord falls through
Source: euractiv.com
