Professor Sir Chris Whitty told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry “multiple capabilities that can be flexed to almost any emergency” were needed, rather than a plan for one scenario.
He told families who lost loved ones during Covid he “saw the extraordinary impact and devastation” while on NHS wards for 12 weeks.
And he said ramping up procedures was an issue “we really absolutely should have taken much more seriously”. He added: “We had a very good capacity to do a very small amount of diagnoses really quickly and we did not have the ability to scale up.”
Sir Chris was backed by ex-UK chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.
He told the West London hearing: “We do not have a diagnostics industry of any scale in the UK, which made scaling up with diagnostics much more difficult.”
Sir Chris also said that not enough thought was given to how a pandemic like Covid could be stopped in its tracks. But he added: “I do think, on the other hand, it is sensible to have a plan for, ‘If everything fails, what are we going to do?’.
“We do still need to be able to say, ‘Let’s go to the top of the range, actually, we could end up with 750,000 people dying, where are we going to bury bodies?’.”
Referring to previous evidence by ex-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and former government policy minister Sir Oliver Letwin, Sir Chris said: “All of them essentially said we saw this huge problem and we didn’t say to the system, ‘How are we going to stop it?’.”
He said although social measures like quarantine, individual isolation and closing schools were not new, lockdown was “the very big new idea” and a “very radical thing to do”.
It would have been “very surprising, without this being requested by a senior politician or similar” that scientists would have planned lockdowns with their “huge economic and social impact ramifications” in advance.
Sir Chris was asked about the fact there appeared to have been no extensive discussions about issues such as speed of transmission or asymptomatic infection in government documents before Covid.
He said: “I think this illustrates a failure in the way we generally operate in government to deal with emergencies, which is to say, ‘We need to have a plan for every eventuality and if you can just pull off the plan and you can tick off all the things you want to do, that’s going to work’.
“Actually what nature is going to give you…the hazards and threats…is going to be completely different every time.”
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