Chris Whitty admits UK ‘overstated danger’ of Covid at start of pandemic

Professor Sir Chris Whitty has admitted during the dark days of the Covid pandemic gripping the nation the Government may have potentially “overdid it” when it came to the danger the disease posed.

The Chief Medical Officer, who became a regular on the country’s television screens during Downing Street briefings on the disease told the Covid Inquiry that he still worries if the authorities struck the right “level of concern”.

Speaking today (Thurs) in London he said: “I was worried at the beginning. I still worry, actually in retrospect, about whether we got the level of concern right,” he said.

“Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into.

“I think that balance is really hard, and arguably, some people would say we, if anything we overdid it, rather than under the beginning.”

Between March 2020 and July 2021 Britain underwent three national lockdowns with varying degrees of restrictions imposed with the view of protecting people from the Covid-19 disease spreading.

School children lost vital lesson time and families become increasing isolated from one another during the restrictions, which some argued were necessary to limit the number of deaths from the pandemic.

Just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry in central London there was never going to be “perfect balance” when it came to stay at home messaging during the pandemic.

However, he said the UK faced an “absolutely catastrophic situation” as it headed towards the first Covid lockdown and, without such a measure, there were very serious concerns about how the NHS would cope.

Critics of lockdowns have pointed to the numbers of people who died from non-Covid conditions which may have been treatable, but where the person stayed at home or could not access normal NHS care.

Jacqueline Carey KC, counsel to the inquiry, asked Sir Chris: “Do you think that we got the balance right between telling people the NHS was open, but equally, protect the NHS, save lives, stay at home? What do you think about that balance?”

He replied: “I don’t think there was ever going to be a perfect balance on this one.

“I am confident what we didn’t do, was to identify over and over again – you couldn’t say it too often – that the NHS is open, in particular if it’s an urgent and emergency life threatening situation, you must go to hospital, as you usually would.

“And there is reasonable evidence, in my view, for example, that the number of people who came into hospital with heart attacks was lower than you’d predict, I don’t anticipate there’s any reason that had been fewer.

“So some of those people were staying at home, who otherwise would not have done, and they would have had remediable conditions.

“So the bit of it, which is, did we get it across that people should still go to hospital? I think we didn’t get it across well enough.”

Earlier, the leading medic was asked about one of the reasons for the first lockdown in March 2020, which was to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.

Ms Carey said: “Can I ask you this, was overwhelmed ever defined by those that were making that decision?”

Sir Chris replied: “Not really, and I think that it’s become, unfortunately, quite a loaded term where people, depending on what point they’re trying to make, either say things were or were not overwhelmed.

“I think the aim of it, though, was to minimise the number of people who died, both directly and indirectly from Covid.”

Describing the health harms from the pandemic, Sir Chris said there were direct harms from Covid – the number of people who died from the virus – and the indirect harms “that come from the system being overwhelmed or at least unable to cope… all diseases, not just Covid, having higher mortality rates than they would have had.”

He said people often forget that, at the time, Covid cases were exponentially rising, with a doubling rate of three to four days.

He said: “At the point we are talking, about four doubling times more would have led us to an absolutely catastrophic situation.

“I’m not saying that where we were was anywhere short of incredibly difficult and, in many places, individual elements of hospitals, individual hospitals, individual bits (of) the system, were coping nowhere near where they would have been if Covid wasn’t there.

“That’s self evidently true, but if we had not had the lockdown, the expectation is that would have got a lot worse.

“I don’t mean just trivial worse, but really quite substantially worse.”

Turning to the “certainty” that a pandemic will occur again in the future, Sir Chris said you could increase NHS capacity “and, taking ICU in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice”.