Matt Hancock criticizes the UK’s approach to Covid

Former health secretary Matt Hancock has criticized UK pandemic planning before Covid, saying it was too focused on dealing with deaths rather than averting them.

He told the Covid inquiry that the focus was on planning for the aftermath of a disaster: “Can we buy enough body bags, and where are we going to bury the dead? That was completely wrong.”

He said he was “deeply sorry” for each of the deaths, but conceded that – for some – his apology would be “difficult to accept”.

When Mr. Hancock arrives at the inquest, a widow shows him pictures of her husband, who had died of Covid.

Lorelei King, 69, was holding two A4 posters, which she showed the former health minister as he got out of a black Jaguar.

One poster featured a photo of Mr Hancock with Ms King’s husband, Vincent Marzello, who died in care home in March 2020, at the age of 72.

The photo captioned, “I shook my husband’s hand for a photo op.”

Mr. Hancock did not answer as he entered the building.

Ms King told reporters: “We were visiting by FaceTime. I noticed something was wrong – his breathing wasn’t quite right.

At the time, there was no test available, and he died five days later.

“Care homes turned into rented homes because there was no testing, there wasn’t enough PPE, but most disastrous is that they got people out of hospitals without testing them.”

She called on Mr Hancock to “tell the truth” in the inquest, adding: “The bereaved families deserve that much.”

Within the inquiry, KC Hugo Keith asked Mr Hancock why, if he was so critical of the UK’s approach to pandemic planning, he had not changed when he was health secretary.

Mr Hancock said: “The only answer I can give is that I was sure we had the best system in the world.

In hindsight, I wish I had spent that short amount of time [before the pandemic] completely changing the attitude towards how we respond to the pandemic.”

Mr Hancock was asked repeatedly about recommendations from Exercise Cygnus, a three-day test conducted in October 2016 to see how prepared the UK was for an influenza pandemic.

It concluded that the UK’s plan was not sufficient to “deal with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic”.

The inquiry saw evidence that only eight of the 22 recommendations made following this exercise had been fully addressed by the time Covid hit work in the other 14, including the social care sector setting, were still ongoing.

Mr Hancock said some of that work had been paused because of the need to prepare the country for a no-deal Brexit.

But he said he was “not convinced” that even if all of these recommendations had been addressed, the country would have been in a better position to deal with Covid.

He called the Cygnes exercise “flawed in its central assumption” that the pandemic was a disaster that needed to be “cleaned up” rather than something that needed to be stopped or contained in the first place.

He said: “The doctrinal ground was the biggest in the long run because if we have a flu pandemic, we still have the problem of having no plan for a shutdown, no preparation for how to do it, no action on what, the best way to close with the least damage.

“I deeply understand the consequences of the lockdown and the negative consequences for many people – many of which still exist today.”

He said he had to overrule initial advice not to isolate people brought back from Wuhan early in the pandemic, and that everyone in the Western world missed out that a lockdown would be necessary.

He said the government had no idea whether care homes had adequate protection, and described the situation as “terrible”.