The Government Failed to Realise Early Quarantine Would Have Stopped the Virus in its Tracks, Says Jeremy Hunt

Government “groupthink” meant it only planned for an influenza pandemic that would “inevitably spread like wildfire” and failed to recognise that early quarantine would have stopped Covid in its tracks, Jeremy Hunt said today. According to the Mail, the former Health Secretary told the Inquiry.

I know you may well want to talk about the issue of groupthink, but I think this was the first example.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight – this was not what I thought at the time and I, with retrospect of course – I wish I had challenged at the time.

But there were no questions asked at any stage as to how do we stop it getting to the stage of 200,000-400,000 fatalities.

It was an assumption that if there was pandemic flu, it would spread, using layman’s terms like wildfire, and you pretty much couldn’t stop it. …

There was quite a lot of thinking but I think, looking back on it, it is very clear that it was very deeply entrenched, almost visibly in every single document relating to this, that you can see that there was an assumption that a mass fatality pandemic would be flu.

I think you’re going to come on and talk about Exercise Alice, which I wasn’t briefed about, which itself is telling. I was asked to take part in Exercise Cygnus.

But I think it is just interesting when you look at that, that the report on Exercise Alice is the only place that I can find which really talks about the importance of quarantining.

And if you look at this assumption that you can’t stop the spread of the virus, I think that was deeply entrenched when Covid arrived and we didn’t look at countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which had a very different assumption about the effectiveness of quarantining.

The fundamental issue was that we were — and by the way not just us, across western Europe and North America — there was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way you could contain a virus because it spread like wildfire.

Hunt, who was Health Secretary from 2012 to 2018, added that the U.K. actually topped league tables of preparedness for pandemics.

Johns Hopkins University in America said that the U.K. was the second best prepared country in the world in the global health security index in 2019.

They had subcategories and one of their subcategories was which countries were best prepared for preventing the spread of a virus and scaling up treatment quickly, and we were top. We weren’t second best, we were top.

And so there was I think a completely wrong assumption and I think the truth is we were very well prepared for pandemic flu because we had put a lot of thinking into it. Exercise Cygnus was a huge thing.

But we hadn’t given nearly enough thought to other types of pandemic that might emerge and that was, with the benefit of hindsight, a wholly mistaken assumption.

Hunt claimed that early quarantine would have stopped Covid in its tracks:

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, and to understand there are types of pandemic where it is worth putting a massive amount of effort into slowing the spread.

One of the very first [questions] we should have been asking ourselves is, ‘is this one of those pandemics that you can actually slow and save lives early on or not?’ And I don’t think we had asked those questions.

How is the myth that South Korea somehow nipped the virus in the bud by being ace at Test and Trace still being repeated in 2023? It only takes a quick look at the data for the region to see that South Korea had no better outcomes in 2020 than the surrounding countries, which were not known for their quarantine prowess, and in the case of Japan did very little by way of countermeasures. Presumably South Korea’s contact tracing was so hot it kept the virus under control in Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand as well.

South Korea also did not fare well when Omicron showed up in 2022 – a variant which affected the region much more strongly than previous variants. Where was the quarantine effect then?

Once again we find myths from the early days of Covid still being repeated unchallenged by senior figures at the public inquiry. How will the right lessons be learned if they can’t even get the facts right?